


Unwanted Visitor

by Riona, salanaland, VampireBadger



Series: Visitorverse [15]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Bad Decisions, Bad things keep happening to Desmond, Time Travel, body theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-30 03:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6406501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona, https://archiveofourown.org/users/salanaland/pseuds/salanaland, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampireBadger/pseuds/VampireBadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Continuation of Visitorverse.  Jacob makes bad decisions, that's always been the kind of person he is. Sometimes those bad decisions get people hurt, but never like this. He's never gotten a friend killed before, he's never struck a deal that brought a genocidal precursor back from the dead...</p>
<p>The story of a bad decision Jacob makes, and the worse one he makes to fix it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_**Then** _

Arno is maybe ten years old and soaked through with tears when Jacob comes to visit him. And Jacob is capable of holding himself back once in a while, actually, so he swallows back the impulse to suggest something fun and crazy to do. He sits down on the bed where Arno is (curled up in the very center, like he's afraid to get too close to the edges). Jacob leans against the wall and kicks one leg around Arno so they're spread out in a V, and pulls the unprotesting boy back against his chest.

"My father is dead," Arno tells him.

"So's mine," Jacob says. "It's not so bad."

Arno's shoulders shake and he buries his face in his tiny hands. "But I  _ loved  _ him," he says. "He was my dad!"

Jacob can't remember ever loving his father. If it had ever happened, it was so long ago that it has been completely buried under all the other shit that's happened since. But Arno had loved his.

"Who's going to take care of me?" Arno asks, his voice quavering through his tears.

"I will," Jacob says. It's not like he has any kind of control over when he visits, but he'll figure something out. Make sure Arno isn't alone. They're friends, aren't they? "I can't be here all the time, but don't worry. Nothing's going to happen to you."

"I don't even know you—"

"Doesn't matter," Jacob says. "All you have to know is that I promised to take care of you, and so I will. Whatever my sister says, I keep my promises. The important ones, anyway. Not the ones about cleaning my room."

Arno takes a breath like he's going to start crying again—then abruptly laughs instead. "I  _ hate  _ cleaning my room."

"Me too," Jacob says.

"This isn't my room," Arno says. He says it quietly. "Someone else is taking care of me now. I don't know him but he brought me home and told me I can sleep here."

"He's going to take very good care of you," Jacob says. He doesn't mention that de la Serre is a templar, or that he'll die way too soon, because frankly Arno doesn't need to know that right now. "But I'll be around. Just checking in, from time to time. To make sure nothing ever happens to you."

-//-

_**Now** _

Something's happened to Arno.

It's easiest to think about it like that, maybe. Easier to think of death as just _something that happens_ , instead of something Jacob had done to one of his best friends. But—

It had been Jacob's idea. Competing to see who could dive into the Seine from the highest point. They'd done the same thing in the Thames, when Arno came to visit Jacob. They'd done it out in the Caribbean, leaping off Adewale's ship, half for fun and half because it drives the ex-pirate absolutely insane.

This is something they've done dozens of times before, and it has always been a favorite game of theirs. This time, though, something had gone wrong. Arno had dived and… not come back up. Jacob's first, instinctive thought was to dive in after him, but the voice of reason in his head (that sounds like Evie) fights the impulse. He won't do any good to Arno if he gets himself injured as well, after all.

Jacob dives anyway. It's Arno.

He finds his visitor on the bottom, bleeding from a long, sharp gash behind his head. Jacob grabs him around the middle and pulls, heaves him to the surface and up to dry land. He crouches over him, desperate and afraid, he shakes Arno, shouts at him, but Arno does not wake.

He just lies there, breathing shallowly. Bleeding. _Not waking_.

Arno isn't quite dead yet. But he will be. Jacob knows it, he’s seen enough people die to recognize the signs. "You can't," Jacob says. There are tears in his voice. "You can't die."

His mind is working very, very slowly but eventually something trickles through. Shouldn’t the others be here? They usually get to say goodbye. But--it’s just Jacob now, and Jacob doesn’t know what to do. Not unless--unless...

Jacob very slowly puts his hand into his coat pocket and pulls out the shard of Eden Desmond had given him years ago. They'd both expected Jacob would be the one to die young. Not Arno. Not Arno, who is only twenty eight, which is far too young to die when he could have had so many years left ahead of him. Jacob has no idea if the shard will work, if it will really send Arno to the future, but he has to hope. He presses it into Arno's hand and squeezes, hard. Hopes this will be enough.

Arno's breath slows.

Stops.

He dies, and the visit ends. Jacob is sent hurtling back to his own time, and the painful dig of the shard into his palm is a horrible reminder of his failure. He'd killed Arno, and then he'd failed to save him. It's only later that Jacob remembers he can't pass things from one time to another, that for whatever stupidly unfair reason, it's only Desmond that can do that.

And now Arno has died for him.

Jacob shoves his shard back into his pocket. Useless piece of shit. Then he stands and ducks out of his rooms through an open window. Evie isn't here, thankfully. She's out somewhere, trying to make certain the power vacuum created by Starrick’s death won't be filled by other Templars too quickly. There is no one to ask where Jacob is going. 

Evie would have. She would have made Jacob admit that he is going to find Arno's grave. To be sure he's really dead.

It takes far too long to get there, to travel all the way to France, and when Jacob finds Arno's grave at last, it almost kills him too. The guilt is a noose around his neck, the worn, untended stone an insult to everything Arno had been. There’s nothing left on the stone but the name. His birth and death dates had been worn away long ago by time and weather, along with anything else that might have been carved there.

Jacob spends the day clearing the space around the stone, wiping dirt away, making sure Arno's final resting place is—decent. Then he looks at the headstone next to Arno's, and in the worn out letters he recognizes Elise's name. Arno would have liked that. But he wouldn't have been able to stand the sight of her grave so unkempt. So Jacob cleans that, too.

He lies down then, on the ground, his back resting against the headstones and the shard clenched in one hand. For the first time, he allows himself to cry for his fallen friend.

-//-

_**Then** _

"Really?" Arno asks. He is already leaning against Jacob's chest but now he looks up, tilting his little boy face toward Jacob. "You'll take care of me?"

"Oh, sure," Jacob says. "And you know what else? We'll go on lots of adventures."

"I don't know if I like adventures," Arno says doubtfully.

"You'll like these," Jacob says. "I promise—I always have good ideas."

"Okay," Arno says, nodding. "I'll go on  _ your  _ adventures. You'll still take care of me, right? Always?"

"Yep."

"You won't—" Arno's voice cracks again. "You won't die, like dad did?"

"Oh no," Jacob assures him. "You and me, Arno—we're going to live forever."

Arno laughs at him. At least he's laughing. "No one lives forever," he says.

"We will," Jacob says. "We'll have fun adventures. You'll see so many amazing things, Arno, and—well, I don't want to spoil them for you. You'll see, and they'll be _amazing_. You'll be amazing, Arno."

"But—" Arno wrinkles up his face and keeps arguing, with the single minded intensity of a child. "But we won't really live _forever_ , will we?"

"You have to live like you will," Jacob says. "That's always been my theory. You live every moment like you can never die, or what's the point of living at all?"

Arno almost argues, but stops with his mouth open, thinking this over. "Okay," he says. "Okay, maybe we can live forever."

"Sure we can," Jacob says, patting him awkwardly on the head. Arno giggles and swats him away. "I know it."


	2. Chapter 2

Jacob is not ready to give up on Arno. The shard hadn't worked, but Jacob is willing to risk quite a lot on the hope that the only reason it hadn't is that Jacob had only been visiting. Had he been there—or had Arno had a shard of his own—things might have been different. Maybe going straight to the source will help.

So Jacob travels to America. It's the first time he's physically been there, and it's strange how different New York in 1871 is from New York in 2000-whatever. In some ways, New York now is more like London now than like New York in the future. Because Jacob has been there, visiting (for a while the future visitors had stayed there—those visits had been _fantastic_ ), and his expectations had not at all matched up to the reality of New York in the 1800s.

It kind of sucks.

Arno would have been interested in the differences, Jacob catches himself thinking. But he hasn't been visited by Arno since he killed him. Maybe the guilt is keeping him away.

"Jacob Frye?"

He turns, pasting a smile across his face. There's a middle aged man standing at his elbow, dressed in clothes that are well made, but worn. Sturdy, but not flashy. "That's me," Jacob says. "Patrick Cormac, right?"

Patrick nods. "I was surprised to hear from you," he says, gesturing for Jacob to follow him. "Why didn't you contact the assassins?"

"I didn't want the brotherhood to know about this. It's—personal. And I hear you'll help anyone, assassin or templar. I thought you might be available for a little bit of side work." Besides, this is one of Shay and Aveline's grandchildren. It's irrational for Jacob to trust him based on that, maybe, when Patrick doesn't know who he is, but rational decisions have always been more Evie's specialty than Jacob's.

"I do help both sides," Patrick says. "I have so much family on both sides, assassins and templars, that it would have seemed disloyal to choose one side over the other. But usually I'm selling supplies from my store or arranging meetings between the two sides. I'm not much of a guide. I don't think I'm the best suited to helping you find the cave you wrote me about."

Jacob sighs and scrubs at his face with one hand. It's been a long voyage. "Come on," he says. "I don't know anyone else in this country, can't you at least point me in the right direction?"

Patrick seems to be sizing Jacob up—he recognizes the look because Aveline gives it to him on a regular basis. Jacob gets the feeling that he keeps failing Aveline, though, while he seems to pass muster with Patrick. "Fine," he says. "I might have a friend that can help you."

"Thank you," Jacob says.

They walk in silence—once or twice, Patrick tries to start up a conversation but Jacob can't bring himself to answer with more than one or two words. He hasn't been particularly talkative since killing Arno.

Finally Patrick takes Jacob into a general store on the very edge of the city. "This is mine," he says, with an air of casual pride. It's a nice enough store, Jacob thinks, well stocked and with a back exit that looks like it's been used frequently by people (assassins, templars, both?) looking to escape guards.

"So you just leave it in the middle of the day?" Jacob asks.

"Not usually," Patrick says. "But I'd heard your ship was docking, and I thought I would come to meet you." He nods at the woman leaning against the counter, tapping her fingers in obvious boredom. She's blue in eagle vision, and wearing enough weaponry to equip a small army, so Jacob assumes she must be an assassin. "This is the friend I mentioned—Joy."

"I need to find a cave," Jacob says, stepping forward before Patrick has a chance to even introduce him. "I sort of know where it is, but not how to get there." He'd been visiting Edward when he and Ezio went to the temple to break that thing that killed Desmond in the first place. But everything looks different in the future, and Jacob knows he'll need help if he wants to find the cave.

"Why do you need to find a cave?" Joy asks.

"Doesn't matter," Jacob says.

"Matters to me," Joy says. "I don't want to go traipsing through the countryside to find some random cave without good reason."

Jacob stares at her. He's come all this way already, and has no intention of turning around without finding a way to save Arno. "I can't explain the specifics," he says. "But a friend of mine is in really bad trouble, and it's all my fault. There's something in that cave that I think might be able to help him."

Joy looks at him, looks him right in the eye. "How sure are you that this thing you're looking for will be able to help him?"

Jacob looks right back at her. "Not at all," he says.

"And how much trouble is your friend in if you don't come back with this whatever it is?"

Jacob's mouth twitches up into something like a smile. "Without it," he says, "he's dead."

Joy sighs and comes around the side of the counter. "Fine," she says. "Tell me everything you know about this cave."

-//-

It takes them ages to get there, but Joy is obviously comfortable in the open spaces between cities. More so than Jacob, who hates every second of their trip. If this wasn't for Arno, Jacob might have turned around half a dozen times and given up. But he makes it. They make it.

"You're sure this is it?" Joy asks when they finally reach the cave. "It doesn't look like much."

Jacob recognizes it, although there hadn't been a wall there when he went with Edward and Ezio. That's a problem he hadn't foreseen. How is he supposed to get to the thingy? "Can you give me a minute?" he asks.

"With your empty cave?" Joy asks.

"Uh—" It does look horrifyingly empty. "Yes."

"Sure." She jerks her head toward the entrance. "It's getting late anyway, and this cave is too shallow to camp for the night. I'll go scout out a better site."

"Thanks," Jacob mutters, and he only relaxes when she's gone.

He spends the next hour trying everything he can think of to get past the wall dividing him from the thing he needs, the thing that had brought everyone else back to life, _the thing that should have helped Arno_.

The others never talk about this, Jacob doesn't know exactly what happened here. If Desmond and his friend found their way past this wall once, in the future, they'd never mentioned it to Jacob.

Eventually he resorts to screaming. Pointless, frustrated, stupid screaming at the wall.

Which is answered.

"You woke me."

Jacob jumps and scrambles backward as a woman made of light (Juno, Jacob has seen her image more than once) appears just next to the wall. He glances down, and sees his shard is glowing. Jacob has taken to wearing it around his neck on a cord, a reminder that he'd killed his friend and then utterly failed to make good his mistake. It's so hot just now that Jacob can feel it burn against his chest.

"I know there's a thing in there that can bring people back,” he says, diving right into his request.

She looks confused.

"From the dead," Jacob clarifies.

"Ah," Juno says. "Yes. Humans, anyway." It's sort of funny, how she can say human and make it sound like an insult. It's a little like the way she smiles and makes it look like a threat.

"Well I need to bring someone back," Jacob says. "A human, so that shouldn't be a problem for you. His name's Arno Dorian, and it's my fault he died, and—" she doesn’t give a single, solitary shit, Jacob can tell. On impulse, he changes direction midsentence. "And I'll do anything you want. _Anything_ , just—I need to make this right!"

"What makes you think you have anything I need?" Juno asks.

"Oh, I can do  _ lots _ of things you can't," Jacob says.

"You dare, human—"

"I can leave this cave, for example," Jacob interrupts. It shuts Juno up, really effectively. She narrows her eyes and doesn’t immediately answer. But that's okay. Jacob can tell by the look in her eyes that  _ got  _ her.

Sure enough, when Juno speaks again, the first word out of her mouth is—"Fine."

"You'll save him?" Jacob asks.

"Yes."

Excitement courses through him. He's done it, he's saved Arno, and he'd figured out how to do it all on his own.

"And in return," Juno adds, just as Jacob's excitement is reaching its highest point. "You will do something for me."

Hmm. That certainly sounds like a bad idea. "Deal," Jacob says. "But—what exactly does that mean?"

"I will see the world through your eyes, listen to its noise through your ears. And at some point, when I have decided how best you can help me, I will give you a command. You will follow it. You will have no choice but to follow it, because disobedience will mean your death."

He doesn't care about his own death—well, he does. Obviously, he's not suicidal or anything like that. But he's always been a bit careless with his own life, and he can live with this deal.

"Hmm." Maybe Juno can read his thoughts on his face, because she gives him a long slow look, and then adds another condition. "I won't give your friend his life back until you've done me my favor."

"But that's not  _ fair— _ " he pauses, trying to think. He's not the smart twin, after all the mistakes he's made lately, he knows he's not the smart twin. But Evie wouldn’t let Juno have things all her own way, she'd wring something back out of her, too. Evie would insist on more conditions of her own. "I won't hurt innocents," he says. "And I won't kill my visitors."

"Your what?"

He looks away. "You'll see," he mutters. "When you're using my eyes."

She sighs. "Alright. I accept your terms."

She reaches out a hand, and Jacob shakes it hesitantly. It feels like plunging his hand into an ice bath. "How will I know what you want me to do?" he asks.

"You will know," she says. Smirks as she says it. "You will _know_."


	3. Chapter 3

“Desmond!” Someone’s shaking him awake, hissing in his ear. “ _Desmond!_ ”

“Mmh?” Desmond grunts, rolling onto his back.

“You have to come with me,” Jacob says, his voice strangely low and intense. “Bring the Shroud.”

“Jacob? What’s—”

“Arno’s dead.”

“What?” Desmond asks, something dropping sickeningly inside him, before he remembers... “But Arno lived... he lived hundreds of years ago, of _course_ he’s dead...”

“He died young,” Jacob says. “He wasn’t even thirty.”

Desmond stares at him.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise. They all lead incredibly dangerous lives. And it’s not as if he’ll never see Arno again; that’s not how visiting works. But he died in his _twenties_?

“It was my fault,” Jacob says, and his voice cracks. “I tried to give him my shard. You know, the thing that was meant to bring him to this time. But it didn’t work.”

“The shards don’t work?” Desmond asks, horrified. He knew it was a long shot from the start, but to know that the newer visitors will just die, that they’ll never really come to join the rest of them here – Jacob, Arno, Adéwalé – _Evie_...

“They might work,” Jacob says. “I don’t know. Maybe I just couldn’t really give it to him. I was visiting, and I don’t – I don’t have whatever you have. I can’t leave things behind on visits.”

So Arno is lost. Maybe there’s a chance for the rest of them, but Arno...

Desmond shakes his head, trying to clear it. It doesn’t really work. He’s been woken too suddenly, he’s been given too much to think about at once. “What were you saying about the Shroud?”

“We need to take it somewhere,” Jacob says. “It’s not far. We might be able to save Arno.”

_Save Arno_. Desmond’s out of bed and pulling on his socks before he really starts to think about this. “I don’t – Jacob, I’m really sorry, but I don’t know if the Shroud can actually bring people back if their... if their consciousness is gone. It worked on Clay, but he still kind of... he was still _around_.”

Jacob shakes his head. “We have to try. It’s Arno.”

“And... you know what the Shroud did to your sister, right?”

What if it does that again? Pushes Evie back to before she met them, all her memories erased?

Then again, would that be such a bad thing? Desmond knows how much pain he caused Evie by getting involved with her. Maybe, if they got to redo things, he’d just... stand back, stay a friend, watch her fall into the life with Henry she was apparently always meant to have.

And if Arno really died so young, if there’s really a chance to save him... Jacob’s right, isn’t he? They have to try.

-

“There’s a warehouse about a mile from here,” Jacob says as they step out onto the street, Desmond carrying the Shroud over his shoulder. “We’re meeting someone there. He should be able to help us.”

Walking distance, then. It’s a relief. Desmond’s still not really feeling clear-headed enough to drive, especially with only the one arm.

It’s a warm night, and it only makes him feel groggier. They’ve been walking almost twenty minutes, Jacob unnaturally silent and tense beside him, when something eventually occurs to Desmond.

“How did you arrange a meeting in my time?” he asks.

Jacob looks startled, then shifty. “Arranged it centuries ago, technically,” he says. “I was talking to someone who, well, had a lot of foresight.”

“So this was, what, a message passed down through the generations?” Desmond asks. “How likely is it that this person will actually be here to help us? How could they know exactly when you’d visit me?”

“He’ll be there,” Jacob says. “I gave him a call before I woke you up. He said he’s been waiting to hear from me for years.”

Who is this guy? It sounds like he really cares about Arno.

Hold on.

“You gave him a call?” Desmond asks, frowning. “But you’re visiting.”

“Er,” Jacob says.

“Jacob,” Desmond says, “did you _take me over_ when I was asleep to use my phone?”

“Oh, look, here we are!” Jacob says, too brightly, and he ducks through an open door.

“Have you ever heard of asking permission?” Desmond demands, pursuing him in.

“ _There_ you are,” a voice says. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

The warehouse looks abandoned, but someone’s set up a load of computer equipment in the corner, all of it lit up and whirring.

“Better on time than late, of course,” the man standing next to it says, his arms folded, “but I can’t exactly expect courtesy now. That’d mean, I don’t know, _time travel_.” He tilts his head. “There was a new employee in the entertainment division, a few years back. They seemed promising. But noooooo, I had to sit on my hands, because I was waiting for _you_.”

Desmond waits for Jacob to introduce him to this guy and, ideally, explain exactly what’s going on, but after a moment he remembers that this guy can’t actually see Jacob.

“My name’s Desmond,” he says. “I’m told you can help a friend of mine.”

“Mm.” The stranger takes a step forward, unfolding his arms, and holds out a hand. “John Standish.” He evidently takes note of the fact that Desmond’s right arm is missing, withdraws his own right hand and holds out the left, with an unnecessary flourish.

Desmond, a little uneasily, takes the hand and shakes it. Shaking hands always makes him feel trapped, now that he only has the one arm; if someone attacks him when that arm is occupied, it’s hard to strike back.

John’s eyes sweep briefly over him, appraising. “I suppose you’ll do,” he says.

“Uh, I’ll do for...?”

John doesn’t answer. His eyes are on the Shroud.

“Arno first,” Jacob says. “Tell him that. Arno first, _then_ the Shroud.”

It takes a moment for the words to sink in, and then Desmond whirls around to stare at him. “We came here to _trade_ the Shroud?”

And then John tries to whip the Shroud off Desmond’s shoulder – Desmond jerks his hand up to grip the end of it, as tightly as he can – and John laughs, presses something against the hollow of Desmond’s throat (a USB drive, Desmond’s startled mind barely has time to register) and twists the shroud around _Desmond_ , it never even needs to leave his hand, and Desmond’s mind explodes into light.


	4. Chapter 4

For a moment Desmond hangs suspended in mid-air, his head lolling, and then his eyes snap open.

They’re glowing.

Jacob isn’t entirely comfortable with this.

_Bring the Shroud to a friend of mine_. That's all she’d asked him to do. He’d guessed that the other visitors would probably be angry with him. He can live with anger; he’s drawn it from Evie all his life. He hadn’t known Desmond would come to any actual _harm_.

Jacob’s attention has understandably been on his hovering, glowing friend, but he registers now that John Standish is standing beside him and shaking all over, and it occurs to him that this is a man who probably needs to be stabbed.

When Jacob sidles up and tries to stab him, though, nothing happens at all. His blade _looks_ like it’s going in, but there’s nothing, no reaction, no mark. Jacob’s visiting, of course; he isn’t really here. If he stabs someone as a visitor, he’s been told, he only _thinks_ he’s the one doing it; it’s really the person he’s visiting. Maybe he can’t influence what Desmond does any more.

Desmond’s feet touch the floor of the warehouse again. John takes a couple of stumbling steps forward, falls to his knees before him.

Desmond takes John’s hand and pulls him gently to his feet. He kisses John’s forehead, then his cheek, then his lips, and an instant later John’s kissing Desmond back as if the secret to eternal life is hidden down Desmond’s throat.

It’s horrifying, frankly. And it seems to last for _ever_. Jacob spends the entire time trying unsuccessfully to take over Desmond’s body; he doesn’t particularly _want_ to be in Desmond’s body when it has this John guy’s tongue in it, but he feels there are probably greater things at stake here. But it’s as if there’s a wall keeping him out.

After far, _far_ too long, Desmond breaks away from John and strokes his hair.

“The presence is still here,” Desmond says in Juno’s voice. “Leave us, beloved.”

“Are you sure?” John asks.

“I have an obligation to fulfil,” Juno says. “Do you imagine he could cause me harm?” She meets Jacob’s eyes, and Jacob realises with a sickening sort of thrill that she can _see_ him.

John nods and retreats, leaving Jacob alone with Juno. With the monster he’s handed Desmond over to.

“Is Desmond still alive in there?” Jacob asks, terrified of the answer.

“He is,” Juno says. “Desmond has sacrificed his life for me once already. I would not ask him to do so again.”

“Does he know what’s going on? Can he... feel?” For some reason, all he can think of is that parting kiss, the brand Roth put on him. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be rid of it.

“Desmond is sleeping,” Juno says, almost gently. “Nothing will seem more than a dream to him. You have no reason to worry.”

_No reason to worry_. Jacob almost laughs.

And then Juno raises her hand to his face – _Desmond’s_ hand – and Jacob takes a sharp step backwards.

“Be still,” Juno instructs him.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asks. His voice is shaking.

“I am upholding our bargain,” Juno says.

She lays Desmond’s hand on his cheek. Jacob flinches away.

“You do not want Arno to live?” Juno asks. “You have done me a kindness. I remember my debts.”

“It sounds like Desmond once did you a favour as well,” Jacob says. “Let him go.”

“I am here,” Juno says. “I have no intention of leaving. Together we will rise to the heights of power. Many men would desire such a partnership.”

“Maybe you could find one of those men, then.”

Juno’s borrowed eyes flash. “Desmond is not a part of the choice you have here. Will Arno Dorian die at the age of twenty-eight, or will he live all the decades you stole from him?”

It’s like a punch to the lungs. Maybe a more principled person would reject the offer, say that if it’s happening this way they don’t want it at all. Jacob isn’t that person. Arno died because of him. Now Desmond is lost because of him. If he can undo one of those things...

“And you need to... touch my face, to save him?” Jacob asks.

“You have a connection to Arno,” Juno says. “I can reach him through your connection.”

“You mean visiting?” Jacob asks. “Desmond has it too.” Or... had. Will Desmond still be able to visit? As himself? As Juno?

Juno shakes her head. Desmond’s head. “I cannot manipulate his connections from within this body.”

Well, that’s some good news, at least. She needs a visitor to stand nearby and let her touch them if she’s going to change what happened to Arno on that day. So presumably she won’t be able to change it _back_ if Jacob, say, finds a way to kick her out of Desmond’s body.

He’s going to have to. Sooner or later Evie is going to find out about this, and he doesn’t think she’ll ever speak to him again.

“All right,” he says. “What do I have to do?”

“Think of your friend,” Juno says. The touch of Desmond’s fingertips to his cheek is feather-light. “Think of the moment you wish to redo.”

Not a difficult task. He hasn’t stopped thinking about it since it happened. Arno diving into the water, not coming up again, dying in his arms...

Desmond’s eyes glow briefly brighter, and Jacob is standing on the bank of the Seine in glorious sunshine.

It’s that day. He knows it in an instant, from the light and the temperature, from the feel of the air, from the sparse scattering of clouds up above, from the grumbling fisherman trying to mend a hole in his net nearby. It’s that day, it’s _this visit_. Every aspect of it has been burned permanently into his mind.

“Jacob!”

Arno claps him on the shoulder, just as he did last time. Back then it had made Jacob’s heart stutter, although he’d tried to hide it with a laugh.

In this moment there’s too much happening inside him, too much guilt, too much fear that this isn’t real, and all he can do is stare.

“Are you all right?” Arno asks, his smile fading.

“Arno,” Jacob says, and he’s embarrassed by how much his voice shakes. How is it possible to waver so much on just two syllables?

“What’s wrong?”

Jacob tries to think for a moment, to find something in his mind beyond Arno’s name. How is he supposed to answer that?

“I’ve done a lot of very stupid things,” he says at last.

The corner of Arno’s mouth twitches upwards. “Well, not to be rude, but is that, er, new?”

Jacob hugs him. Just throws his arms around him and holds him as tightly as he can.

After a moment, Arno sort of pats him uncertainly on the head.

He’s alive. Arno is here, _alive_.

“Is Evie all right?” Arno asks hesitantly, extricating himself.

“Evie’s fine,” Jacob says. “ _You’re_ fine.” _Everyone’s fine,_ he wants to say, but he can’t stop thinking about Desmond, his eyes blank and glowing. He’s made another horrible mistake, in a lifetime of horrible mistakes, and he’s going to have to do whatever he can to set things right.

But Arno is alive.

Jacob takes hold of Arno’s wrist, feels the pulse there, steady, real. “Can we stay here for a while? Not jumping into the water?”

“I suppose I can take a little time to, er, not jump into the Seine, if you insist,” Arno says. “You’re very strange, Jacob.”

They sit on a bench, looking out over the water; Jacob’s careful to steer them away from actually sitting on the parapet, anywhere it would be even theoretically possible to fall in. He hasn’t let go of Arno’s hand. Arno glances down at it, uncomfortably.

They don’t speak, and Jacob doesn’t let go until the bells of Notre Dame have started and finished ringing behind them, the same bells he heard as Arno died in his arms.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Arno asks.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Jacob says. He’s close to tears; he can feel them in his throat, he can hear them pressing against his voice. He pastes on the most obnoxious grin he can muster to make up for it.

“Well, that’s convincing,” Arno says. He hesitates. “Look, I’m sorry if you’re suffering, but I can’t... you _know_ what Élise was to me. I can’t just...”

“Arno,” Jacob says, with absolute sincerity. He puts his hand on Arno’s shoulder and looks deep into his eyes. “I don’t care.”

Arno frowns. “Er, about what, exactly?”

“Look. If you wanted me, I’d be ecstatic.” He feels Arno tense slightly under his fingers. “But it doesn’t matter that you don’t. I’m just glad to know you. Just... keep existing. That’s all I ask.”

Something like understanding dawns in Arno’s eyes. Maybe he’s guessed that Jacob’s seen his death on a visit. He probably hasn’t realised that Jacob saw him die _here_.

He looks for a moment as if he might be about to ask questions, but eventually all he does is shrug and say, “Well, I’ll do my best.”

For what feels like the first time in a very long time, Jacob manages a genuine grin. “Good.”

There’s a pause.

“So,” Jacob says, as casually as he can manage, “if you happen to visit Desmond at any point, and he doesn’t seem like himself, and maybe his eyes are glowing, can you just... remember as much as you can and report back to me? Or the others in his time?”

Arno stares at him. “What?”

“You know,” Jacob says. “Try to find out where he is, when he is. If any hypothetical evil entities possessing him seem to have any weaknesses. That sort of thing.”

“ _What?_ ” Arno repeats.

And a moment later Jacob finds himself in his own time, standing in a New York hatter’s shop with the distinct feeling that he’s made a very large mistake.

In a way, it doesn’t seem right to be so happy that Arno will live past that visit; it feels like a betrayal of Desmond. He doesn’t think he’d have taken Juno’s offer if he’d known exactly what it would mean, but...

Well. He killed Arno, and he’s managed to fix it. It’s hard not to feel a thrill at that.

Now he just has to fix the _other_ terrible thing he’s done.


	5. Chapter 5

Jacob is getting tired of New York. He wants to go home, but that's suddenly out of the question. He isn't sure he can look Evie in the eye and tell her he's just broken Desmond. He—

_ "Jacob Ethan Frye _ . _ " _

He's visiting. He's visiting someone in the future, and Evie's visiting too. He's visiting someone in the future, and Evie's visiting too, and she's just used his full name (including his middle name, which she's never used, not even when she's  _ really  _ mad), and she's just hit him.

Jacob stands blinking at her, numb. Numb except for the stinging patch on his face where she’s just slapped him. They don’t hit each other, not ever. They’ll fight with words, with long, angry silences, with insults of every kind, but neither twin has ever hit the other in anger. "…Evie?"

"Don't you dare stand there and look innocent," she says. "What did you do?"

He doesn't know where to start. Instead he looks around, sees an absolutely livid Haytham looking back at him. Excellent. Suddenly, Jacob regrets encouraging them to make friends. The two of them teaming up against him is completely terrifying.

"I saw you," Haytham says. "This morning, you left with Desmond and the shroud. Now he's gone, and no one can find him.  _ What did you do _ ?"

Jacob opens his mouth, closes it again. He doesn't think saying he'd sacrificed Desmond to save Arno will carry much weight with these two in particular. He swallows, and looks between the two of them. "I fucked up," he says. And then he tells them everything. He tries to emphasize the fact that  _ Arno had died _ , and he'd only been trying to help…

Evie's face is pure shock when Jacob finishes his story, and Haytham is angrier than Jacob has ever seen him. He says nothing, but steps forward and hits Jacob across the face. It's totally unexpected, and Jacob falls back, stumbling into Evie. She catches him, but the uncertain way she grips his arm makes it seem like she's thinking about letting him drop.

"Hey!" Jacob protests.

"Don't," Haytham snaps. "Don't! Do you hear yourself, Jacob? Do you realize what you’ve done to my son?"

Jacob tries to answer, but suddenly he can't look Haytham in the eye. The templar is angry, yes, obviously. But there's more to it. He's scared, he's mourning, he's—Jacob doesn't understand the depth of the loss and the misery there. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm going to make it right, though, I promise."

Haytham snorts. "I don't believe you."

Jacob glances over his shoulder at Evie, and slumps. She doesn't believe him either. "I will," he tells her. "I  _ will  _ fix it!"

"You don't fix things," she says. "You break them."

"But—"

"Grandpa?"

All three of them look at the door, and Jacob flinches away from Desmond's daughter. She's a mess. Her eyes are red from crying, her hair is a tangled nest, and she's holding a little stuffed toy so tight Jacob thinks she might just squeeze it out of existence. Every few seconds, a fresh sob wracks her small body, hard enough that she almost stumbles.

Haytham kneels in front of her, Jacob forgotten for the moment, and she presses herself up into his chest. "Grandpa," she says, voice muffled. "No one will tell me where daddy is. He didn't tell me he was gonna go. He  _ always  _ tells me if he's gonna go. And he calls to say he's okay but he  _ didn't  _ call to say he's okay so I think…" she finishes her thought all in a rush, words bursting out of her along with a fresh waterfall of tears. "I think  _ maybe he's not okay _ , grandpa!"

Haytham doesn't say anything, just holds her. It doesn't seem like enough, and Jacob is miserable watching them. Elena's crying gets worse and worse, and eventually she's gasping horribly for breath that won't come through her tears. Haytham stands, still carrying her, and hurries from the room. Jacob almost forgets to follow, but Evie pulls him along with her just before they drop out of visiting range.

In the kitchen, there are the other six visitors to deal with. They don't know exactly what's happened yet, but clearly Haytham's told them about seeing Jacob. Jacob hadn't even noticed Haytham watching him take Desmond away, he'd been so focused on bringing Arno back. Every one of them gives him a dirty look, but it's still easier than looking at Haytham as he digs a paper bag out of a cabinet and holds it over Elena's face. She tries to turn her head away but Haytham talks her into breathing into it. Somehow, that seems to help her breathing steady. It doesn't stop the tears though.

"I'm going to put her to bed," Haytham says when Elena is mostly breathing normally again.

"No," she moans. "No, grandpa, I have to wait for daddy to call, he always calls to say goodnight, even when he's on a mission…"

He carries her away, still protesting, and apparently Elena's bed is close enough to allow Jacob and Evie to stay where they are.

"Jacob," Evie says quietly. "Tell them what you did."

Although maybe staying here isn’t such a good thing. It's no easier explaining everything a second time than it had been to explain it to Evie and Haytham. At least they're all together, he won’t have to do this again. The only ones that don't know now are Adewale (who doesn't believe in any of this anyway) and Arno.

Arno.

What will he think, when he learns that Jacob had traded another man's freedom for his life?

"We have to get him back," Ezio says. "There has to be a way."

"Connections, maybe," Altair says. He doesn't sound particularly hopeful. "I've studied Pieces of Eden more than anyone else here, and that's the only thing I can think of. Emotions, bonds. That might be able to break the hold Juno has on Desmond. Or it might not." He looks back at Ezio. "We could ask Elena to talk to your son, when she's calmer," he says. "He's done at least as much research as I have."

"How would Elena do that?" Evie asks.

"Our children are her visitors," Altair says, gesturing to each visitor as he names their children. "Darim, Marcello, Jenny, Jacob, Matthew, Rory, and Jeanne."

"Oh."

"Why don't we just ask Elena to go to Desmond after we figure out where he is?" Jacob asks. "If all it takes is a strong bond, there's no one closer to him than she is—"

The overwhelming chorus of disapproval that meets this suggestion is enough to send Jacob stumbling back a step.

"There is an insane woman from before the dawn of recorded history living inside her father's skin," Connor says. "A woman whose main goal seems to be destroying humanity in revenge for her husband's death. And you want to put that little girl directly in her path?"

"Let me talk to Elena, at least," Jacob says.

" _ No _ ."

Jacob doesn't see who says it, but he looks up and sees the wall of frowning, angry faces looking back at him. And he knows that  _ no  _ could have come from anyone.

"I just want to fix things," Jacob says.

"You. Don't.  _ Fix  _ things," Evie says again. And Jacob looks at his sister, and… oh. There's no trust there, no belief in him. Just disappointment and anger. Maybe this is just it. Maybe there's no coming back from this.

His face burns red, and he feels about three years old. Jacob looks down at his feet, and feels tears prick in his eyes. The worst part is he  _ knows  _ he's not even crying for Desmond, he's crying for himself and the mistakes he's made.

"Look at this," Shay says. He's using one of those phone things everyone in this century seems to be attached to at the hip, and he flips it around for Jacob to see. His stomach churns at the sight of Juno. She… he?  _ Juno _ is dressed in a sort of long, flowing white fabric, somehow ancient looking and strangely refined at the same time, like a noblewoman (nobleman?) from some long forgotten empire. She is smiling, and it's a gentle expression but Jacob can see the teeth behind it. She looks out at what seems like at least a few dozen men and women, all bowing down to her. Him. Whatever. There is so much of Juno in that face, in those blank white eyes, that Jacob has to struggle to remember this is Desmond's body.

"Instruments of the First Will," Aveline says. "Juno's cult. We got a few hours of footage off the cameras Rebecca left in the Grand Temple in New York. Then they found the cameras and smashed them, so we're totally blind."

"We know where they are," Ezio mutters. “For all the good that does us."

Jacob stares at the picture of Juno or Desmond or whatever it is. Juno, probably. He thinks about John kissing Desmond's body earlier, thinks about Juno's voice coming out of Desmond's mouth, thinks about the deal he'd made that brought things to this point in the first place. He wants to throw up.

Sometimes, visiting is kind. Jacob vanishes at that exact moment, and he's back in New York, standing in Patrick's general store, staring at the ground like an idiot and trying not to cry.

"Jacob?"

It's not Patrick but Joy that approaches him. When Jacob looks up, Patrick is giving him a panicked look (Jacob recognizes it, he feels it on his own face on the rare occasions he's faced with an emotional Evie and has no idea what to do). Joy smiles as much as she can and gestures to the back of the store. "Come on," she says. "I'll make you some tea."

Waiting for the tea to be ready gives Jacob an opportunity to think things over, and be really sure he wants to do what he's about to do. He's not usually a thinker, but rash decisions have cost him too much lately. And in the end, when Joy gives him a little smile and hands him a cup, Jacob has justified things to himself. He trusts both Patrick and Joy. They've helped him, and he'd got to know Joy pretty well on their way to and from the cave. Besides, Jacob knows some of the others have friends they've told about visiting.

"I'm a time traveler," he tells her. "I mean—kind of."

"What?" Her mouth quirks up in a little smile, as if at a private joke. "Time travel?  _ No _ ."

"I can sort of visit these people in other times," Jacob says. "It's weird and confusing, but the point is sometimes I mess things up. You traveled with me. I'm sure you have a pretty good idea of the kind of fuck ups I'm capable of."

She politely says nothing.

"But I did something really bad. I cost a friend his life, and to save him I ruined the life of another friend."

"When you say ruined—"

"Desmond's being possessed by this ancient crazy lady," Jacob says flatly. "She took his body because she doesn't have one and she wants to crush humanity or something. And the thing is, I just saw his daughter." Jacob looks down at his tea, and takes a mouthful just to have an excuse not to keep talking for a moment. "Elena."

When he looks back up at Joy, her expression is one of carefully arranged stone. Probably she thinks he's crazy. Jacob presses on anyway.

"She doesn't even know what I did to her dad yet," he says. "She just knows he's not with her, and it's  _ killing  _ her..." he takes a breath. "But see, I think I have a way to save Desmond, to fix everything! I can do it, I know I can! I just… the others won't let me talk to Elena. I  _ know  _ Desmond will snap out of this if he sees his daughter, but I'm not allowed to talk to her. So I need your help. She's a time traveler, like I am, but—" he hesitates, struggling for a way to describe the separate clusters of visitors. "We can't travel to each other. I need to talk to her group, and there are a few that live in this country, in this time, and I thought if anyone can help me find them, it's you and Patrick."

"Jacob—"

He ignores her, gesturing expansively in the general direction of the store's main room and Patrick. "I mean, Patrick is Shay and Aveline's grandson, two of Elena's visitors are their daughter and son—he's probably related to some of the people I'm looking for."

“Oh yes?” Joy says, and she sounds…. Skeptical, like somehow she's just pretending to listen and to care. Jacob keeps going anyway. 

 

"Rory and Jeanne," he says. "They're Shay and Aveline’s kids. And then Matthew… Kenway, I guess? His dad's name is Connor, but apparently the whole Kenway thing is a sore point in that family."

"Jacob!" This time, Joy actually reaches out and grabs his shoulders. For a second, she seems to be teetering on the edge of saying something important. Then she deflates and shakes her head. "Matthew's my father."

"Huh." He gives her a funny look. "What are the chances of that?"

She doesn't quite smile. "He… passed," she says. "A few years ago."

"Oh." Jacob feels torn between disappointment that part of his plan isn't going to work out, and sympathy. "I'm sorry?"

She nods a little. "Rory's gone too," she says. "Jeanne…" Her hesitation seems to last a lifetime. Jacob has no backup plan if he can't get to any of Elena's visitors. "She's ill, but still alive."

"Take me to her," Jacob begs. "Please."

-//-

Their second journey together is somehow even more tense than the first. When Joy took Jacob to the cave where he accidentally sold Desmond's soul to Juno, he'd been entirely focused on Arno. Now he's lost, distracted by thoughts of his myriad failures. The journey seems to take forever.

But they reach Jeanne finally, and Jacob waits only long enough for a cursory introduction before diving into his explanation. "This might sound crazy," he says. "But I need to get a message to Elena, and you and your visitors are the only way I know how to do that."

Jeanne's gaze flick sideways to Joy, and she raises her eyebrows. Joy frowns and nods.

"You have to tell her to go to the grand temple," he says. "I don't know the year—she's pretty young, but right after her dad goes missing, she needs to get there. Okay? The people around her will know how to get there."

Jeanne  _ laughs  _ at him. Laughs!

"Please," Jacob says. "You have to believe me."

"I do," Jeanne says, still grinning. "I just can't believe this is where that message started—feels like I've been passing that backward my whole life."

"So… you'll help?"

Jeanne nods. "I will."

Jacob sighs. "What do you need from me?" he asks. His last bargain had certainly made things worse, but there's no way Jeanne will do this for free. Jacob is sure this will cost.

Jeanne takes his hand in her wrinkled one. "Nothing," she says. "I'm doing this for Elena. Because she's my friend, and she needs her father."

"So if you've known her, can you tell me… does it work? Does Desmond come back?"

"Wait and find out for yourself," Jeanne says. "I do know what happened to him, I heard that story. And I know what you did to cause it, Jacob Frye."

"I'm sorry," he whispers. "I'm so sorry."

Jeanne looks away from him, at nothing. "Do you hear that, Elena?" she asks. "He's sorry."

Behind them, Joy takes an eager step forward. "Is she here?" she asks, and when Jeanne nods, Joy grins.

Jacob ignores them both, looking helplessly in Elena's general direction. "Elena," he says. "I'm so sorry for what I did to your dad. And I’m sorry I couldn't make it better, but—I'm trying. This is all I know how to do."

Jeanne squeezes his hand more firmly, and when she speaks her accent is just slightly off. Elena, borrowing Jeanne's body maybe? "I forgive you," she says, and the words are a rush of relief over Jacob, badly needed after everything that's happened lately. It's not Desmond's forgiveness, but it helps.

"Thank you," he whispers. "Thank you, thank you…"

It's not perfect. It's not an assurance that everything (or  _ anything _ ) has been fixed. Maybe Desmond is still doomed. But it's something. It's enough to let Jacob sleep well that night, without nightmares, long and deep.


	6. Chapter 6

"I got surveillance on him," Rebecca begins, sliding into one of the mismatched folding chairs around the collapsible banquet table that serves as a dining room for the safe house. "In New York." She plops her laptop onto the table and pulls up the video. It's a grainy black and white video, but it's clearly Desmond, or Juno in Desmond's body, talking to a teenage boy.

"That's an Abstergo drone," Haytham remarks, pointing to the text in the corner of the screen. "I recognize that code. Why is there a drone following this young man? What's so special about him?"

"You sure the drone's not following Desmond?" Shay asks, bending over the computer so his shoulder brushes Haytham, who stiffens almost noticeably.

"Why would Abstergo have a drone following Desmond?" Haytham asks. "They don't know he's alive, and they don't know Juno's a threat yet, the idiots." He and Shay share a look of exasperation. They've been trying to take down Abstergo for a couple of years now, and are constantly stymied by what they refer to as "malicious corporate stupidity".

"Anyway," Rebecca redirects them, "she's basically kidnapping kids now to be her worshippers." They watch as the boy disappears into his house, reappears with a backpack, and leaves with Des--Juno.

"He didn't seem too unhappy to go," Connor says over his father's shoulder.

"Well, sure, she's like using her cult mind control thing on him. Cult leaders do that. You know, maybe she love bombed him or something," Rebecca guesses.

"Love bomb?" Shay wrinkles his nose.

"Yeah, she promises him that this is the place that he'll fit in and everyone's so happy to see him join them. People who are lonely or depressed or," she waves a hand at the computer, "angsty and hormonal and adolescent, they're susceptible to that sort of thing."

"Whatever it is, she'll have to be stopped," Connor says, and Haytham frowns.

"We've talked about this, and _no_ , I won't countenance it."

"We may have no choice," Connor warns quietly.

* * *

The drone on the boy turns out to be exactly what they need--wherever Juno goes, the boy goes, and wherever the boy goes, the drone goes. Altaïr and Connor catch up to Juno-- _Desmond_ , Connor reminds himself, it's still Desmond somewhere in there, or so Haytham insists--in a small city in upstate New York. She's, he's, walking around barefoot in the snow, leaving an absurdly famous restaurant with a gaggle of followers in tow, including a disproportionate amount of the waitstaff. The followers mill around, and Juno wanders up a side street. It's a bad idea, since it gives Connor the chance to grab her.

Altaïr silences her with a carefully controlled punch that makes her collapse, and they quickly stuff her into the van that had taken ten minutes to parallel park. Altaïr ties her up in the back while Connor drives through the crowd of college age revelers and around the lake (and he feels a pang, thinking of the people who used to live here, forgotten but for the name of the lake), to the highway, and back to the safe house.

"He's coming around," Altaïr says tersely when they're almost there.

"Is it him, though?" Connor asks.

"Desmond?" Altaïr calls softly and with a surprising gentleness. There's some muffled groaning in response. "Desmond, if that's you in there, blink your eyes three times." After a minute, he coaxes, "Just blink your eyes three times, Desmond, if it's you."

"Your idea didn't work, did it?" Connor asks flatly.

"Head trauma was worth an attempt," Altaïr insists. "Let's get her into the basement while Elena's asleep, and we can try everyone else's idea."

"Except mine."

"Except yours."

* * *

"I don't feel quite right about this," Shay murmurs to Aveline, kissing her. The children are in bed, everyone else is asleep. Juno is securely trussed up and glaring at them, Aveline's lit some candles, and there's rose petals on the inflatable mattress. All that's left is something they've done an estimated ten thousand times over the course of their relationship, but Shay finds himself hesitating.

"I know. It's strange, isn't it?" Aveline asks, artfully sliding the strap of her lace nightie down her arm. "And I'm not sure why. It's not like we've never done it with someone watching. It's not like we've never done it with _Desmond_ watching. For two seconds before he went and hid."

"That's the point, isn't it?" Shay asks, kissing her shoulder and neck. "To bring back all his traumatic memories of seeing us."

"Mmm, yes," Aveline murmurs, tilting her head so Shay has better access to her neck and ear, which he promptly begins to nip. "So very traumatic we are. And here I thought you were romantic."

"I thought you were highly desirable," Shay tells her in a low voice, sliding his hands up under her nightie. He rips the flimsy fabric accidentally as she pushes him down onto the mattress.

* * *

Haytham wakes them with a pained sigh. "It's still Juno. And please. You have blankets after all; could you be bothered to use them?" He's got a tray with a bowl full of Lucky Charms, two slices of toast with cherry jam, and a plate of something fried that smells both pungent and fishy.

"You didn’t whine last week about seeing me naked," Aveline complains, lazily pulling a blanket over her breasts.

"Now's not the time!" Haytham whispers hoarsely, flushing. He clears his throat and tries to regain his composure. "I've brought Desmond his favorite cereal and I thought we could have breakfast together."

Shay wrinkles his nose and sleepily mutters something about rancid whale.

When Haytham un-gags Juno, she retches from the smell and refuses to eat despite Haytham's cajoling.

* * *

Edward swaggers in, still smelling of ocean and the lack of a bathtub, and announces, "I came back as soon as I got your message."

"You mean, as soon as you figured out how to get my message on your phone," Haytham corrects him.

"Yeah, that only took a couple of days," Edward admits breezily. "Look. I figure this must be like the Bleeding Effect. And this one time, I helped Desmond with his Bleeding Effect problem. So it might work this time, the same thing."

"It might," Haytham admits. "Have at him."

Edward crosses to where Juno is tied to a chair and kisses her, quite thoroughly.

"Father!" Haytham yells, shocked. "What on Earth are you doing?"

"Desmond," Edward calls. There's a string of saliva connecting his mouth to Desmond's, and Haytham tries not to notice. "Oh, Desmond..."

"You will die first for the way you've touched me," Juno spits out.

* * *

“Do you have an Apple?” Ezio asks Altaïr.

“No, this is a ...grapefruit? I believe?” Altaïr looks confused for a minute at the yellow fruit in his hand. “Odd name for a fruit.”

“I meant an Apple of Eden. Or do we know where one is?” Ezio persists.

Shay looks up from his bowl of Cookie Crisp. “You can’t be serious, Ezio. After all the problems the shroud has brought us? And all the other pieces of Eden? Best to leave them well alone.”

Ezio ignores him. “What about mine? Whatever happened to it?”

“I believe that’s the one Desmond had, but I don’t know where it is now,” Altaïr replies unhelpfully. “What do you need it for? Most things I learned from mine are on Wikipedia nowadays.”

Shay stabs a cookie savagely with his spoon. “It’ll only cause death and ruin,” he warns.

“It can manipulate visiting, can it not?” Ezio muses. “Perhaps it can force Juno out of Desmond’s body.”

Altaïr frowns deeply. “I agree with Shay here. I’m not sure it could do that, and I wouldn’t want Juno to get her hands on it. She can already bend minds without it. What could she do with it?”

Ezio sighs heavily. “It was just a thought.”

* * *

"Do you have any ideas, Adé?" Edward asks, looking up from the toilet to see his former quartermaster. "Desmond's possessed by Juno, and--"

Adéwalé rolls his eyes. "My hallucinations are having imaginary problems now?" He thumps himself on the side of the head and adds, "Put it away, Edward, I'd rather never have imagined seeing that."

* * *

They argue in the safe house, back and forth, for days. Juno refuses to eat and rarely talks, only promising retribution on them for her captivity. The visitors take to gathering in small groups where they can see her but she can't hear them, and arguing.

"You can't. You just can't," Haytham insists. "I will not let you."

"This is _Juno_ , Father," Connor tells him stiffly. "Who knows what she'll do if she gets free? We can't let her loose on the world."

"You can't seriously be thinking of killing Desmond," Ezio remonstrates.

"Of course he can," Haytham snaps, "it's not like he's never killed a visitor before."

Connor glares at his father in icy fury and leaves the room.

* * *

Connor wakes in the middle of the night and finds Aveline waiting on one of the couches.

“Will you stop me?” he asks.

“Perhaps,” she answers. “I haven’t decided.”

“Do you think it’s the right thing?”

“I don’t know.” She frowns. “I must place my trust in my own hands to divide right from wrong. Not in Shay, or you, or Haytham, or anyone else.”

Connor nods. “That is fair.”

“I will help you get her into the car, though,” Aveline offers.

“I would appreciate it.” They wrestle Desmond-Juno into the back of the van despite her angry glares at them, and Connor drives.

After half an hour, Aveline asks, “Where are you going?”

“Where I first spoke to her,” Connor replies. He takes the van off road and stops at a hill overlooking where a river empties into a lake. They get out and he looks around in wonder. “The forest has taken it back,” he breathes, and stands for a moment. Then he opens the back of the van.

They pull Desmond--no, Connor must think of only Juno if he is to do as he must--they pull Juno out and Connor drags her to a huge tree. She’s passive-aggressive the whole way, flopping her stolen body every which way and generally behaving like a recalcitrant toddler, minus the screaming. Aveline brings the rope and Connor starts to wrestle Juno up against the tree while Aveline wraps the rope around her.

The forest lights up as he’s trying to tie a good firm knot, and a small sedan screeches to a stop beside the van. The sedan door opens, and Haytham runs over and launches himself at Connor, yelling, “No!”

Connor barely has time to brace as Haytham tackles him, and the two of them roll around in a mass of knees and elbows that Aveline nimbly avoids.

“I’m not--trying--to hurt you, Father!” Connor gasps as Haytham punches him in the stomach.

“That’s a first!” Haytham snaps, then whimpers as Connor knees him in the crotch. He manages to get behind Connor and wrench his arm backwards, and Connor twists around and slaps him on the side of the head.

“Connor! Haytham! Enough!” Aveline calls, tugging on Haytham’s foot and managing to drag them a little apart. Haytham goes through a range of facial expressions, finally settling on a sort of guilty grimace, and jerks his foot out of Aveline’s grasp self-consciously. “Look,” she tells them, pointing to the tree where she and Connor had been tying Juno, who is nowhere to be seen. As Haytham and Connor struggle to their feet, a man steps out of the forest holding a gun.

“Hello there, Assassins...Templar… _humans_ ,” he sneers, as if this is the worst insult he can deliver.

Connor reaches for his own gun, but the man points his weapon swiftly at Haytham’s head. “Uh uh uh, you don’t want to kill him again, do you?”

Connor blinks, nonplussed, as Aveline frowns and asks, “Who do you think we are?”

“I only worked at Abstergo for _how_ many years?!” the man asks, exasperated. “You each have your own _floors_! I know all about you, Aveline. Haytham. Connor. Not that I _care_. But imagine my surprise when I traced the van that stole my wife and find it coming to an old Indian village with **her** inside? And then I see people who were supposed to have died centuries ago about to execute **her**!”

Aveline is stealthily creeping towards the man’s gun hand, and he sees her suddenly and pulls her close, holding the gun to her temple. Haytham flings a hand in front of Connor as if to hold him back, and continues conversationally, “Speaking of people who died centuries ago, you look like a man my father knew by the name of Roberts.”

The man sighs. “Yes, I do, but I’m not him. The man was a loony. Drinking tea on a pirate ship. Seriously! My name’s John Standish. And these people are called Instruments of the First Will.” He gestures and six or seven people step out of the forest, some with guns pointed at Aveline, who looks cool and somewhat bored.

“Where’s Juno?” Connor asks through gritted teeth.

And she appears, minus ropes and gag, although angry red welts on her wrist and ankles (Desmond’s wrist and ankles) show where she’s been bound. “Leave this place,” she orders, “and I will let you live. For now. I’ll kill the blond man first, anyway.”

Standish looks at Connor. “Drop the gun or Aveline dies and I’ll make sure she stays dead.” He pauses reflectively. “I always shipped the two of you.”

Connor wrinkles his nose in confusion, but carefully sets down the gun. One of Standish’s cronies grabs the pistol, and then they leave. Standish pushes Aveline away, and she rolls and comes up ready to fight, but Standish and Juno have already slipped back into the dark forest.

Haytham rounds on Connor. “You should never have taken her from the safehouse.”

Connor snaps, “ _You_ shouldn’t have stopped me.”

“You _should_ have let them shoot me,” Aveline says calmly.

“No!” Haytham nearly shouts, and Connor frowns at the fear on his father’s face.

Aveline shrugs. “Well, she’s loose, which none of us wanted. What do we do now?”

“Recapture her,” Connor says glumly.

“We have to find some way to save Desmond,” Haytham insists. “If we’d only had a little more time.”

“Then Elena would have found out we were keeping her father a prisoner in the safehouse basement,” Connor tells him. “I assume you would volunteer to explain that one to her?”

Haytham sputters a little, then changes the subject. “You know, you could track them.”

“In the dark?” Connor rolls his eyes. “Besides, I _know_ where they’re going.”

“You do, do you?” Haytham asks peevishly as a distant engine starts. “Where might that be?”

Connor heaves a tired sigh. “To the sacred cave. The Grand Temple.”

“We can’t confront them all,” Aveline interjects. “There’s only three of us, and they took your gun.”

“I have more weapons in the car,” Haytham says offhandedly, “but if we have a firefight, we might hurt Desmond.”

“Or get killed, ourselves,” Connor adds.

“Perhaps we should go home, then,” Aveline suggests gently. “We can regroup and plan _with the others_.”

* * *

“He _what_?!” Shay asks, his voice heavy with dread.

“Held a gun to my head,” Aveline tells him gently. “Don’t worry.” Shay promptly ignores the last two words and seems intent on checking his wife minutely for possible injuries.

“They got away,” Connor summarizes, giving his father a withering glare.

“So, Desmond’s still alive, good,” Ezio says thoughtfully. “But Juno’s still got him, bad. And now Juno’s out and about, we didn’t stop her, and we don’t know how to get Desmond back. Very, very, very bad.”

Connor mutters something, and Haytham throws his hands up in the air. “I thought you almost killed Desmond already.”

“No,” Connor tells him stubbornly, “ _you_ stopped me.”

“Putting a bullet into the head isn’t _almost_ killing someone,” Altaïr points out.

“Actually, there was a man who survived an iron rod through his brain,” Shaun interjects.

“That’s not what I meant,” Connor says. “I didn’t remember it before, but when I was in the...the other world of the Apple,” he falters.

“The one where you were a bunch of animals?” Edward asks, excited. “...what? I thought it sounded cool. Like a movie I saw a couple years ago, actually. There was this guy, and he had this mask, and--”

Altaïr clears his throat. “What are you saying, Connor?”

Connor pauses for a moment, then continues. “In that world, if I nearly killed or did kill someone, I broke the Apple’s hold over them. Perhaps _nearly_ killing Juno will allow Desmond to regain control of himself.”

“We’d have to get her back first,” Shay says.

Ezio rubs his chin, thoughtfully. “Do you know how to get to the Grand Temple? I think I remember.”

“Yes,” Haytham and Connor say together. Connor stares at Haytham, who shifts in his chair and looks uncomfortable. “What? I went there with Ziio,” he tells Connor, almost belligerently. “That was where we first kissed. You have that cave to thank for your very existence.”

Connor’s face darkens as he flushes, and he makes a disgusted face. “I cannot believe you would--”

“And, of course,” Shaun interrupts, “ _I_ know where it is, as does Rebecca, and William, if anyone cared.”

“How many does Juno have there?” Altaïr begins, but everyone stops silent as Elena wanders in, yawning.

“Can I have Lucky Charms for breakfast, Grandpa?” she asks hopefully.

Planning will have to wait.


	7. Chapter 7

Jacob is learning to dread visits.

He doesn’t know which is worse: seeing his visitors from the future when they all hate him for what he did, or seeing his visitors from the future when they don’t _know_ they’re going to hate him for what he did. Sometimes he’ll meet Evie from a time when she’s prepared to speak to him, but that just makes _his_ Evie’s silence more painful. All he can think about when he’s with Arno is his guilt, and how Arno is probably going to stop talking to him as well when he finds out what he’s done.

By this point, Adéwalé’s actually his favourite visitor. Being told he doesn’t exist is like having a glimpse of a better world.

His stomach clenches when he feels the tingle of visitation, and he looks up. It’s Shay.

Shay who hates him, or...?

Shay looks from the bottle in Jacob’s hand to the door of Evie’s carriage, tightly shut. “This is after, then?”

Shay who hates him. Jacob braces himself.

Shay taps him on the shoulder and sits down next to him. “I know what it is to make mistakes, you know.”

That’s not what Jacob was bracing himself for. “What?”

“Did anyone ever tell you how I came to leave the Assassins?”

“You were an Assassin?”

Shay leans back against the sofa cushions. “I’ll take that as a no. Cut a long, unhappy story short, I fiddled with a Piece of Eden, and a lot of innocent people died.”

Jacob stares at him. “What happened?”

Shay shakes his head. “It’s not a tale I like to tell. But Pieces of Eden are always trouble.”

“I’m getting that impression,” Jacob says.

“And it sounds like you were acting for a better cause than mine.”

Jacob sits up sharply. “You believe me, then? About Arno?”

He’s been so sure that nobody believed his story, that they thought he’d got Desmond possessed because... he doesn’t even know why. Because he thought it would be amusing? Because he _wanted_ the terrifying glowing woman to form a terrifying cult?

“I believe you,” Shay says. “We’ve been talking about it. Before we lost Desmond, none of us had visited Arno past thirty. Some of us have seen him older now. Like this thing happened in our time, and the past changed.”

“He died in my arms,” Jacob says, quietly. “It’s been killing me, being the only one who really _knows_ it happened.”

“I’ve lost friends,” Shay begins, and then he shakes his head. “I’ve _killed_ friends. And it was on purpose when I did it.”

“Why?” Jacob asks, taken aback.

Shay shrugs. “I’m a Templar. They were Assassins. I thought I didn’t have a choice.” He pauses. “You may have noticed I changed my stance later in life. It’s possible for Templars and Assassins to live without being at each other’s throats.”

“I don’t know,” Jacob says. “You do seem to be at Aveline’s throat rather a lot.”

Shay smiles a little at that, selfconsciously, rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry. I know we’ve given you an eyeful more than once.”

“Don’t apologise. It’s spectacular.”

Shay coughs. “Anyway. I found Aveline, and she’s perfect. But it was painful to realise an Assassin didn’t have to be my enemy, when I’d already spilled the blood of so many I cared about.” He looks sidelong at Jacob, with a wry smile. “I haven’t spoken of this for decades. I hope you appreciate what I’m going through to show you a bit of solidarity.”

“I do,” Jacob says, quickly. “So you’re saying...?”

“I’m saying that if someone told me they could bring those people I’d killed back to life,” Shay says, “I’d probably have done something stupid too.”

“I didn’t know she was going to take Desmond,” Jacob says. “I swear. I thought all she wanted was the Shroud.”

Shay nods. “I know. And you shouldn’t have taken it to her, but we’ve all done things we shouldn’t do. And you brought Arno back. That’s not nothing.”

Jacob’s still trying to find the words to thank him when Shay vanishes.

Jacob sits back with a sigh of something like relief, closing his eyes. The knot in his chest has eased a little. Maybe he won’t be left completely friendless, after all.

And then his eyes snap open again, because the tingle of visitation hasn’t gone away.

He looks to the side. God, not Arno. It can’t be Arno.

It’s Arno, of course. There aren’t many places to hide here, but he’s flattened himself against the bookshelves.

“Oh, hello,” Arno says, too brightly. “Just happened to show up.”

Jacob’s heart is in his throat, choking him. “How much did you hear?”

“Were you discussing something sensitive? I hadn’t realised.”

“ _How much_ , Arno?”

Arno hesitates.

“Well, I’m not sure exactly what I was hearing,” he says. “Something about losing Desmond. And something about me.” He shifts on his feet. “It sounded like you said I’d died, but – I suppose we visit each other at different times, and I can’t really expect myself to be immortal, so...”

He’s going to have to tell him the whole story, Jacob realises. Maybe it’s best to get it over with now. “You were _young_. Twenty-eight. And it was my fault.”

He realises as he says it that this possibly isn’t the best place to start.

Arno’s eyes widen for an instant, and then he frowns. “Well, I’m twenty-nine now, so that seems unlikely. Unless twenty-eight was an estimate, in which case I suppose I should probably be worried.”

Jacob shakes his head. “I tried to fix it.”

“You tried to fix it,” Arno echoes. “Me being dead.”

“And it _worked_ ,” Jacob says. “I found a way to go back and redo the visit. So I never said we should go diving, and you never cracked your head open.”

Arno stares at him for a long, long moment. “You...?”

“Surprise,” Jacob says, with a weak smile.

“So all those times when you couldn’t keep your hands off me—” Arno seems to realise what he’s saying halfway through, and flushes. “I mean, you were holding on to me. As if I’d wander off and get myself killed the second you stopped paying attention.”

Jacob smiles again, uncomfortably. “Turns out it’s a difficult thing to recover from, a friend dying in your arms.”

“I understand being on the dying side is hard to recover from as well,” Arno says. He’s trying to sound flippant, but it’s plain he’s shaken. Of course he is; the man’s just found out he’s supposed to be dead. “How is it that I’m standing here now, exactly?”

He’s thinking of Élise. Jacob can see it in his face. But Jacob has learnt from experience that striking deals with Precursors isn’t a great idea, and Juno seemed to use visiting to let Jacob redo that day with Arno; is it even possible to save someone who isn’t a visitor?

Does he really _have_ to crush Arno’s hope right now?

But Arno’s already picked up that something’s wrong from his silence, it seems. “What happened to Desmond?”

Jacob flinches.

“You said something odd about him a while ago,” Arno says. “Something about him not being himself. And it sounded like you were talking about it with Shay. Did something happen because of me?”

“It was _me_ ,” Jacob says. “Everything that’s happened, it’s all been my fault. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“So you weren’t trying to bring me back to life?” Arno asks. “Because that’s certainly the impression I’m getting. I got myself killed, and that’s the reason something happened to Desmond.”

“I was the one who killed you in the first place!”

“By saying we should go diving?”

“You wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t said it,” Jacob says. “I went back and didn’t say it and you didn’t die, so you can’t pretend it wasn’t me.”

Arno folds his arms. “Not exactly a murder, is it? I evidently wasn’t cautious enough.”

Jacob swallows. “I made a deal with someone I thought could help. She wanted the Shroud.” The _fucking_ Shroud. It’s been nothing but trouble from the start. “Turned out she wanted a body as well. So she’s living in Desmond, because I brought him to her, and we don’t know if there’s any way to save him.”

“Because I died,” Arno says, quietly.

“Because I _killed you_.”

“Jacob,” Arno says, “I owe you my life. You can try all you like to make me angry with you. It’s not going to work.”

Jacob opens his mouth and then closes it again, because suddenly his throat’s too tight for speech.

“You’re not going to stop talking to me, then?” he asks, after a moment. It doesn’t seem real.

Arno shakes his head. “Things have been... tense with the others, on my last few visits. The ones in Desmond’s time. I suppose they didn’t want me to find out about this. Or they’re thinking about how it all began with me.” He shoots Jacob a _don’t say anything_ look, and sits down next to him. “I think we need to stick together, the two of us.”

“God, I’m never going to be over you,” Jacob mutters, leaning his head against Arno’s shoulder.

Arno laughs, apologetically, and shifts closer to make him more comfortable.


	8. Chapter 8

The first (or last, perhaps) person Jeanne tells is Rory. "When Elena can't find her father, she needs to go--"

"Ugh!" Rory rolls his eyes at her. "I _know_ already! You're the one that told me in the first place."

"I know _that_ ," Jeanne says, rolling her eyes in return. "But if I didn't tell you now, nobody would have told anyone."

"I hate it when we're out of order like this," Rory grumbles.

"Well, if we weren't, I wouldn't be able to tell you at all," Jeanne retorts. "You're dead."

Rory sticks out his tongue. "I'm not dead yet, Templar scum!"

"Assassin fool," Jeanne replies, and smiles. They continue insulting each other for the rest of Rory's visit, and Jeanne keeps her tears at bay until he's gone.

She misses him. Dumb as he can be, she still misses him.

* * *

Jenny waves her cane angrily at Rory. "I've been telling people all my life about Elena going there," she complains. "I know it's important. You don't have to tell me!"

"If I didn't tell you now, nobody would know. That's what Jeanne says," Rory tells her, ducking. His old bones creak.

"She should have just told Jacob," Jenny complains. " _Her_ Jacob. Then she could have told Jeanne when she was a child, and she could have told Elena, and the rest of us wouldn't have to be involved."

Rory privately agrees, but he just shrugs. "Safer this way," he reasons. "What if she just told Jacob and then Jacob died before the next time we came to visit the Homestead?"

Jenny just grumbles and shakes her cane again.

* * *

"What I want to know," Jenny tells Darim, "is why nobody could pass messages back through time for _me_. You know, like, 'prepare to be kidnapped' or even 'your brother will rescue you some day'." She rubs the nearly invisible scars on her wrists, courtesy of a broken water pitcher and years of despair.

"I don't know," Darim tells her. "But if we were going to pass you such a message, we would have already done it. And we didn't, so we can't."

"It makes my head hurt," Jenny complains.

* * *

"Dead!" Marcello crows as Darim stumbles.

"You almost gave me a heart attack," Darim complains, not without affection. He's used to Marcello's quirks now, after years of being together. Which reminds him that Marcello's young, young enough that they might not be involved. He hesitates.

Luckily, Marcello is too busy chattering to notice. “Were you Assassin training? Can I watch? Don’t you get hot in all this heat? Maybe you should take off your outer robes to train. Do you ever do that?”

Darim smiles tolerantly. He’d forgotten how transparently obsessed Marcello had been with his body. “Listen, this is important. It’s about the message we have to get to Elena. She has to go to the Grand Temple--”

“I know, I know!” Marcello cuts him off. “She has to go to the Grand Temple when her father disappears. It’s very important. But, ah, now that you’ve passed on the message, maybe you could show me a few things with a sword? I mean, even as a bookseller I might need to defend myself against book thieves. They’re quite vicious. You could correct my stance and things.”

Darim grins. It’s adorable, the lame excuses Marcello is inventing to touch and be touched. “Sure.” It’s not like he minds using those lame excuses to touch the man who will someday be his lover.

* * *

"Stop calling me Cello! This is important!"

Elena grins. "I just love bugging you. How's Darim?"

"He’s, uh, he’s fine. Um, he’s really fine…strong...handsome...why?”

Elena rolls her eyes. “You’ve got it bad for him, don’t you?”

Marcello waves her comment away. “I do not! But anyway, that's not the _most_ important thing. That's a message that has to get to you, but a younger you."

"About the Grand Temple, I know."

He sighs. "I hate all this going backwards in time! Sometime we'll actually run into each other when we haven't already heard this, and we'll have to convey the whole message, and how do we all know the details? Did someone actually tell each of us the full message, or have we all been like, 'oh I know this already' the whole time? And do we really know it already, or do we just think we do?"

"Cello, you're overthinking this."

"I overthink everything. Don't you know me by now?"

Elena grins. "Not as well as you want Darim to," she teases, and Marcello grins bashfully.

* * *

"Jacoooooob, I have a messaaaaaage," Elena whines. Her history homework isn't getting any easier and the last time she got help from her visitors, she got a D for not citing any sources. It's put her in a bad mood, and even the sight of Jacob with her hair stiff and matted funny from salt water isn't enough to cheer her up.

"A message for whom?" Jacob asks, taking the opportunity to sit down on the couch. It's been a long day aboard the ship; the seas are choppy and she almost got washed overboard. It's a relief to sit on soft cushions and think of passing messages. 

"It's for me. But, you know, young me."

"Oh, about the Grand Temple?"

"Yeah, that one." Elena sighs. Thinking about everything that went down at the Grand Temple is really not helping her with the causes of the Seven Years War.

"All right. I'll keep passing it down.”

* * *

"I want to stay at the Homestead! I'm sick of being a shoemaker!" Matthew complains.

"You have a mother, Matthew, and she cares about you. Don't take that lightly," Jacob chides him. They're sitting in the warm kitchen with Jenny. Jeanne and Rory are playing checkers on a stolen board beside them, and they've made up a number of house rules that seem to consist mostly of giggling.

"If she cares about me, why did she send me to her brother's, then?"

"She wants you to have a good livelihood," Jacob reasons.

Jenny looks up from her needlepoint. "Not to interrupt the friendly advice, but Matthew, have you heard about the message?"

"The Grand Temple?" Jeanne looks up from the board, and Rory steals some of her checkers. "Jacob told me."

"Yes, I know," Matthew complains grumpily.

"It's for Elena," Jacob reminds him. "It's very important. You do want to help Elena, right?"

Matthew brightens a little, and is fairly certain he's blushing a bit as he thinks about his last visit with Elena, the one where they did nothing but kiss for three hours. "Yes. I do."

* * *

"Eleeeeeena," Rory calls softly, and Elena opens up one eye, but makes no move to get up from where she and Desmond have fallen asleep watching her favorite movie for the millionth time.

"What you want, Rory?" she asks with a yawn.

"It's important, Elena," he tells her. "You gotta pay attention. One day your Daddy's gonna go away."

"No he won't," she insists. "He's my daddy."

"Yes, he will. That's the message. He's gonna go away for a long time, and you have to go to the Grand Temple to get him back."

"What's the Grand Temple?"

"I don't know, but it's where your daddy's gonna be. Only you can get him back. That's why it's important. All right?"

"Okay," Elena tells him, yawning, and cuddles back into Desmond's arms. "Silly Daddy going away."

Just then, Haytham comes into the room. "Desmond? Elena? Did you fall asleep watching that ice movie again?"

Elena giggles. "Yes, Grandpa. And now Rory's here!"

"Rory?" Haytham asks. "How's he doing?" Rory shies away as Haytham's hand nearly hits him in the head.

Elena shrugs. "Okay. He had a message for me. It was silly." She pokes Haytham's nose as he leans close to hug her. "I booped your nose."

Haytham pokes her nose in return, then hugs her. "I booped yours," he tells her gravely. "Time to brush your teeth."

She wriggles out of Haytham's arms and runs towards the bathroom. "Race you there, Rory!" she calls, and he takes off after her as Haytham smiles after them.


	9. Chapter 9

It's not…  _ quite  _ like a dream, but the world around Desmond doesn't exactly make sense the way the real world should, either. He sees the shapes of things, blurred and colorless and unreal. They are without detail, and he can't make them make sense. He doesn't know what's important and what isn't, he doesn't even know what things  _ are.  _ Every once in a while he'll think he recognizes someone, or something, but then just as quickly it'll be gone. The face of a friend will twist into some monstrous nightmare, a familiar place will turn into a maze of shadows, and only the certainty of dream logic keeps him moving. It's like there's something in his head, guiding him. And it's the only sure thing left, it's clearer even than Desmond's sense of self, at this point—so he goes along with it.

Time doesn't really exist. Sometimes he'll blink and he'll  _ know  _ that lots of stuff has happened, but it's just like a big blank spot in his head. And then sometimes he'll be hyperaware of every second that passes, everything he sees burning itself into his mind. The world passes him by in fits and bursts, which just makes it harder to figure out what's going on.

It's a little like bleeding, except there is nothing filling him up. He's losing himself, but there aren't any ancestors rushing into his head to replace him. There's… something there, in his head, but the something in his head wants nothing to do with him.

-//-

Elena is tired, she's dirty, she's hungry, she's cold. She had to run away to get here, and she doesn't even know where here is. She knows it's called the Grand Temple (which sounds scary), and she knows the way here from home. But that’s it. Elena's visitors had told her she needs to be here to help her dad, so she's here.

No one would tell her how to get here, so she had to call her  _ other  _ grandpa, the mean one. She hasn't seen him since she was two (which is five years ago, when she'd been a  _ baby _ ), and he'd sounded really happy she'd wanted to call him. Elena knows no one ever tells him what's going on, so he doesn't know her dad left. He doesn't know that her dad's just… hiding in the Grand Temple, or that something's wrong, or that Elena is not supposed to go look for him. Mean grandpa had been confused when she asked where the temple was, but told her anyway. Then he'd asked her if she wanted to keep talking, but Elena had a lost dad to find, so she said no and hung up on his sad sounding "Oh."

It isn't very far away, but Elena's not very big and she doesn't know how to drive. She has to walk, and she's all by herself, and it takes her all day. When she leaves home the sun isn't even up yet, and by the time she gets there, the stars are out again.

She can't make herself go in. Instead, Elena leans against the rock wall of the cave, breathing hard so she won't start crying. Her legs hurt, and she's scared, and it took a long, long time to get here. She's not sure she can get back all by herself if her dad isn't here. She didn't eat before she left, and her stomach keeps making noises. Elena hadn't been thinking of anything but bringing her dad home, but now that she's here she doesn't know if that's going to work.

…Her dad had left. Maybe he doesn't want to come home.

Someone grabs her by the hair and pulls, hard—Elena screams in pain and surprise as they drag her along the rocky ground toward them. She struggles, trying to pull their hand off her hair, but it only makes it hurt more. The someone twists her around and crouches down so they're face to face, and Elena freezes. She should be looking at the knife in the hand that isn't holding her by the hair, but she can't look away from the man's eyes. They're different colors, and really, really angry.

"What do we have here?"

She kicks him because her throat is too dry to say anything. The man says a really bad word and hits her in the face with the back of his hand. The knife somehow misses her but the man is wearing big, heavy rings. Three of them, and they all hurt where they hit Elena but one of them splits her cheek open so that it bleeds.

"Brat!" he spits, and starts dragging her again. Elena struggles feebly, then gives up and goes along with him because it really hurts not to. The way he's holding her hair, she's stuck looking at the ground, and can only really see people's feet. It seems like there's a lot of them here, but none of them are her dad. But he  _ has  _ to be here, he  _ has  _ to…Her mind spins in confused circles, she's panicking. Elena takes a deep breath and tries to calm down. 

The man drags Elena all the way to the back of the long room. There's only one person back here, and when Elena risks looking up a little, it takes her a minute longer than it should to recognize her dad. He… he looks different. Her heart stutters in fear and Elena shrinks back, closer to the man with the knife because suddenly he's less scary than her dad right now. He's—there's something wrong with him.

He's been missing for six months. A whole half year, but that still doesn't seem like enough time for him to change this much. He has makeup on his eyes. He's wearing some long, flowy white fabric that kind of looks like a dress, and a fancy head… thing that looks like part crown and part veil. He grew his hair out, and his eyes are white.

"Daddy?" Elena whispers.

He looks at her like he doesn't know her, and Elena starts to shake.

"She was hanging around the entrance," the man with the different colored eyes says. "I thought you'd want to deal with her yourself."

Daddy nods. He raises his hand, and a cold shock rushes through Elena as she realizes he's about to hit her, just like the man had.  _ Her daddy is going to hit her _ . "Daddy!" she screams. She's so scared, her voice breaks and her eyes well up with tears and she wants to be  _ anywhere  _ but here. "Daddy, please!"

-//-

The scream is what does it. One second Desmond is raising his arm, slow motion and dreamlike. There's… something in front of him. A dark smudge on the world that he just knows is bad, and he's going to hit it until it goes away. His body seems to move smoothly, on its own, but Desmond has no reason to protest and no reason not to lash out.

Not until the darkness screams in Elena's voice, and suddenly the world seems to shatter. His mind struggles for a moment—it feels like something is trying to hold him down, like it's beating him back. But Desmond is suddenly determined, his daughter is in danger and his love for her is stronger than any other bond he's ever had. To anyone. In his entire life.

The thing in his head gives a little. It bends—it  _ breaks.  _ In a moment, the thing has gone completely, as though it had never been. Desmond is alone, seeing the world around him for the first time in… a while. It's like he's been looking at things through a dark window, and now it's broken away so he can see clearly. Desmond takes a deep breath and freezes, hand raised to—to strike the darkness, except it has just burst into pieces and behind it is  _ Elena _ , and everything in him, mind body and soul, is singularly opposed to hitting her. He won't do it, he can't.

He drops his hand and hugs her instead.

"D—daddy?"

"I'm here, baby," Desmond promises. He doesn't know where here is, he doesn't know what's going on or why Elena is here—the last thing he remembers clearly is Jacob tricking him into trading the shroud away, and then nothing but a long, vague dream.

"You  _ left _ ," she says, and then bursts into tears.

Desmond looks up from her, even as he holds her tighter to try and reassure her. Had he left? This is the temple, but what is he doing here? What is Elena doing here?

"Juno?"

There's a man standing just behind Elena, looking at Desmond like his heart's just been broken into pieces. His whole body has gone slack and numb, and he reaches out to Desmond. Desmond flinches away, shifting to keep himself between Elena and this stranger. "Juno?" he repeats. "What does Juno have to do with anything?"

"She has to be there!" the man says. "In your head. You weren't supposed to be able to take your body back! That's  _ her  _ body now! After all that trouble we went to, putting her mind in your head—"

Okay,  _ what _ ? Desmond goes through a brief, terrified inventory of his own mind. It's a habit he'd gotten into when he was using the animus, and it doesn't take long now to be absolutely positive there's no one in there but him. No Juno. No anyone. Desmond can't imagine that there was enough room left for her in his head in that moment when everything in him had been given over to love and concern for Elena. "She's not here now," Desmond says, and the man collapses into a sobbing heap on the ground.

Maybe it would be best if Desmond killed him, here and now. But he's confused, he has no idea what's happened here. He takes Elena by the hand instead (she presses in close to him, tears letting up only a little), and leads her out past him.

They only make it a little farther before Desmond pulls up abruptly. There are… maybe three dozen people here, all looking up at Desmond and Elena. When they see him, every single one of them drops to their knees. Something in Desmond's stomach flips over. It's like they're worshipping him _. _

"Come on," he whispers to Elena. "Quickly."

But she shakes her head and pushes a little away from him. Not enough to let go of his hand, just enough so she's not leaning on him. Something flashes in her eyes, a righteous anger that Desmond has never seen from her before, and she screams, "Hey!"

The word echoes and reverberates around the temple's high walls, and slowly the people look up at her. They wear the puzzled looks of people that have been interrupted in the middle of something they've done a hundred times before, and don't quite understand why.

"Elena—" Desmond hisses.

She ignores him, frowning out at everyone else. "This is  _ my  _ daddy," she announces, and Desmond has never heard her little voice sound so authoritative or certain. "I know he's the best one, but he's mine and I'm taking him home. None of you can have him anymore, so leave us alone!" She's glaring out at them all, fiercely protective, and even through his mounting confusion, Desmond feels a growing surge of pride for her bravery. Worry too, of course, because some of these people are sure to get really,  _ really  _ angry at Elena for interrupting their… whatever they'd been doing. "Go home to  _ your  _ daddies," Elena continues. "Stop stealing mine!"

These people have weapons, Desmond registers numbly. Knives. Guns. A lot of them look like they know how to use them. But they just stay where they are, frozen in numb surprise by the sheer unlikelihood of being shouted at by a seven-year-old girl. Desmond can't exactly blame them, he's feeling pretty numb himself. Elena tugs at his hand and drags him past the heavily armed men and women that had been illogically  _ worshipping  _ him a second ago. She stops at the entrance, turns around with her hands on her hips, and shouts "Go home!" at them again. Then she marches Desmond the rest of the way out.

"Wow," Desmond says, when they've gone a little way, and somehow still haven't been stabbed or shot. It doesn’t even sound like anyone's chasing them. "Elena, that was—thank you. That was incredible, that was so, so brave."

She flushes and grins. "I was rescuing you," she says. "I  _ had  _ to be brave."

Desmond hugs her a second time, and she hugs him back like they haven't done this in months. Maybe they haven't? She's so much taller than she had been when Desmond last saw her, what feels like this morning. How much time had passed while he'd been dreaming in his own mind, his body apparently stolen by Juno? How much had he missed? What had he  _ done _ ?

"Come on, daddy," Elena says. "We moved since you ran away, and it's kind of far. But it's okay, I know how to get home. I'll take you there."

"Lead the way," Desmond says. And he's confused, he's horribly afraid of finding out the truth of what's happened to him. But right now, at least, he's perfectly happy to follow his beautiful, brave,  _ incredible _ daughter all the way home.


	10. Chapter 10

Elena doesn't make it all the way back to the safe house. She doesn't make it very far at all before she starts to lag visibly. Her head droops, and she focuses on each step she takes, lifting one foot, pushing it forward, and letting it fall again. She's still clutching at Desmond's hand (he thinks he's going to lose feeling there soon), but now she's leaning on him too.  
  
Desmond stops walking and crouches down in front of her. By now they're out of the thin woods surrounding the cave where the temple hides, and farmland is starting to slowly transition to suburbia. He sits her down on the sidewalk and her eyes sort of blink closed as she curls up against him.  
  
"How far did you walk?" Desmond asks.  
  
She yawns, hugely. "I walked all day, daddy…"  
  
"Well you can't walk all night too," he says, looking around. There aren't a lot of options right here, but walking isn't an option. Camping out on the sidewalk isn't an option. The only option Desmond can see is a house at the end of the block with large signs on the doors that scream FORECLOSED in block letters. At least it'll be empty. "Come on," he says, tugging Elena to her feet.  
  
"Mmm…?"  
  
"Just a little bit farther," Desmond promises, but that last block takes forever. The house has clearly been broken into before (the door opens easily) which is a stroke of luck, but Elena is mumbling complaints the whole way. She's hungry, she's cold, she wants to go home—Desmond wishes there was something he could do, anything, but he doesn't have anything to offer her but the clothes on his back.  
  
The clothes on his back. Juno's clothes. He'll have to deal with that soon, but right now it's much more important to take care of Elena than himself. Desmond glances around, but the house has been gutted. It looks like someone had used it for some kind of drugs, at one point, but even the needles scattered on the floor are covered in a thick layer of dust.  
  
He turns back to Elena, bracing himself for another pleading 'but I'm hungry, daddy,' and blinks when he sees she's fallen asleep already, curled up and shivering on the floor with her arms wrapped around herself. Well, at least he can do something about the cold.  
  
Desmond is wearing what feels like layer after layer of heavy fabric, carefully arranged to fall just so. He starts to unwind it, and is surprised by how smooth it is running over his hands. This must have been expensive, and he wonders where Juno got it from in the first place. She doesn't seem like the kind of person that would actually pay for what she wants, but somehow Desmond can't picture her staging the robbery of a crafts store, either. Maybe it had been a gift from one of her followers?  
  
Maybe it doesn't matter. Desmond pulls off the last of the fabric and crouches over Elena to drape it over her like a blanket. The shivering stops, and she seems to relax a little more. That's good, at least. Unfortunately, the fabric had been wrapped around his body in one long piece, and giving it to Elena has left Desmond nearly naked. He's still wearing a pair of underwear, although they're definitely not his.  
  
He thinks of waking up, about to hit Elena—and he thinks of the man that had been watching him, the one that had looked heartbroken and devastated when he realized Juno was no longer in Desmond's mind. Had he been in love with Juno?  
  
…What had they done with his body while Juno inhabited it?  
  
Desmond shivers, suddenly aware of the cold, and after a last glance back at Elena to make sure she's still asleep, he leaves the room to go search the rest of the house. He needs to make sure no one else is here, and given the state of the house it would probably be good to make sure there are no animals (or humans) skulking around. Also clothes. He isn't particularly hopeful on that front, but he would feel pretty stupid if he didn't even bother to look, and just sat around in someone else's underwear the rest of the night.  
  
The first floor is as torn up as the first room where Elena had fallen asleep, but the second floor is in slightly better shape. Whoever had stripped the place hadn't quite finished up here—maybe the police had showed up, maybe there had been a fight, but either way most of the bedrooms are dirty but still intact.  
  
Desmond steps over a suspicious looking stain on the floor of the master bedroom, heading for the closet. It's a little picked over, but he finds a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. It's a horrifying shade of light blue, and says Washington High School PTA in almost unreadable cursive. Under that is a picture of what Desmond assumes is the mascot. It might be either a badger or a sheep, but the art quality makes it impossible to tell. Juno had apparently been as opposed to shoes as she was to the continued existence of humanity, so Desmond is barefoot. He roots around for shoes but comes up empty, and reluctantly decides he can live with that.  
  
It's not hard to figure out why this shirt had been left behind, and then ignored by whoever came to pick the place over, but it's better than being naked so Desmond throws it on anyway. Six months ago it would have been uncomfortably tight, but whatever Juno has been doing with his body it obviously doesn't involve the amount of climbing and running and sparring Desmond is used to. He's not exactly out of shape, but there's a little less muscle than he's used to.  
  
Also a little less hair. A lot less hair—Juno had been very thorough in removing every stray strand of body hair. That feels really weird, now that he's thinking about it. He casts around for something to distract himself, and his mind lands on a completely unwanted mental image of Juno scouring his body for stray hairs.  
  
He shakes the thought away and keeps going. The next room he comes to is a bathroom, and Desmond stares morosely at his own reflection in the mirror for a moment. He's wearing makeup—the water in here is turned off, but Desmond rubs at it with his fingers until it smudges and mostly wipes away. His hair is long and looks stupid too—a quick root through the medicine cabinet behind the sink yields a pair of scissors, and Desmond attacks his hair with it.  
  
Really, this shouldn't feel so good. But Desmond feels like he's been gradually shedding the physical marks Juno had left on him, all the things she had done to make his body look more like hers. His hair is the last thing left, and Desmond hacks at it without thinking. The scissors are old and rusty, and it's hard to make them work at all, much less work well. Eventually, Desmond manages it.  
  
His hair is uneven and still a little longer than he would have liked, but it's nothing like Juno anymore. Desmond throws the scissors (it feels like an act of triumph) and they clatter against the cracked bathtub on the opposite side of the room. He runs his hands through his hair, brushing out cut up hairs. Some stick to his shoulders and itch, but the rest drift to the dirty tile floor where several inches of his hair have already gathered.  
  
It feels good. He feels lighter.  
  
This problem solved, Desmond manages to finish looking through the rest of the floor more quickly. His search yields nothing else that might help, so he heads back downstairs to check on Elena.  
  
He freezes at the bottom of the stairs, because yes, Elena is still in the same place he'd left her, still curled up and asleep, but she's not alone anymore. There's a teenager crouched over her with his back to Desmond, head cocked as if he's studying her intently.  
  
His bare feet make no noise at all as Desmond runs to the boy, and for a moment he is actually grateful to Juno for refusing to wear shoes. Then the moment is gone, and Desmond is on the boy—he pulls him to one side, away from Elena, and throws him roughly to the ground, pinning him so he can't move. It has apparently been several months since Desmond last did anything really physically strenuous, but he's angry and that's his daughter. Besides, this kid is skinny, almost as scrawny as Desmond had been at that age, and his struggles to break free do absolutely nothing.  
  
Desmond glances at his wrist, half hoping a hidden blade will magically appear there. Nothing, of course, he's still weaponless. Doesn't matter. "Shut up and keep still," he says, quiet enough to keep from waking Elena. "Or—"  
  
But he doesn't even have to finish the threat. As soon as he tells the kid what to do, he just does it. His body goes instantly still, and he looks up at Desmond with some kind of fragile hope, something Desmond… doesn't know how to name. He ignores that for the moment, focusing instead on the boy's face itself. Specifically his eyes, which are two different colors—the same as Standish's had been. In fact, his entire face looks not so much similar as identical, and Desmond wonders if the two of them might be related.

"Stay quiet," he says. "But tell me what you're doing here."  
  
The boy's tone is more than quiet, it's deferential—almost reverent. He whispers, but it’s the kind of whisper a man might use in a church. "I followed you," he says. "When you left the temple. I need to find her."  
  
"Elena?" Desmond asks.  
  
The unknowable expression on the boy's face scrunches up into a far more ordinary teenage confusion. "What?"  
  
Desmond keeps his arm on the boy, pinning him down, but jerks his head back in Elena's direction. "You said you needed to find her, didn't you?"  
  
"No…" They stare at one another for a moment, and Desmond has the uncomfortable feeling they're having a fundamental misunderstanding. "Not her," the boy says. "Her."  
  
"Juno?" Desmond guesses.  
  
"Juno," the boy agrees. He drops his voice still farther, and his eyes half close as if just saying the name is something to be savored.  
  
"She's gone," Desmond says, pressing a little harder against the teen. "She's dead."  
  
"She's not!" The boy's eyes fly open again, and for the first time he strains against Desmond. "She can't be! She can't—we need her."  
  
"She is dead," Desmond says again, slowly, as if that will make things get through more clearly. "Trust me, I know when there's someone else in my head. And there's just me in here."  
  
"She's not that easy to kill!" the boy says. "She—no. No, she has to be in there. She wouldn't allow herself to be killed so easily."  
  
"There wasn't room for both of us," Desmond snaps. The memory of waking up is still too recent and painful for him to want to dwell on, but he remembers the brief feeling of crowding in his head. Remembers how scared he'd been for Elena, scared of what he'd been about to do to her. Remembers how that terror had filled his whole mind, driving out the thing he'd been just barely aware of. There is absolutely no doubt that Juno is gone. That she is dead.  
  
Unfortunately, the teen seems just as certain as Desmond—but certain of the wrong thing. "It's alright," he says, relaxing again. "Most people don't understand. I will serve and obey you as I served and obeyed her, until she can take your body back again."  
  
The boy looks so dead certain that for a second… just a second… Desmond doubts. He takes a deep breath and hardens himself. No, she's gone. Gone. "That's not going to happen," he says. "This is my body, and I'm not giving it up again."  
  
"She can take it whether you want her to or not."  
  
Well, that much at least has already been proven. Desmond scowls at the reminder. "I don't want you to serve me," he says. "I don't even want you hanging around."  
  
"I have food," the boy says. "A phone. Do you think that could help?"  
  
"So give it to me and leave."  
  
The boy visibly struggles with this, and Desmond watches with a kind of repulsed fascination. He can see the indecision crawling across the boy's face, his promise to serve and obey warring with his obvious desire to stay as close to Desmond as possible. And then he does something unexpected.  
  
He starts to cry.  
  
Desmond has faced many enemies in the animus. He has killed people in his own time, and scores of his ancestors' enemies as well. But he has never been faced with one like this, a teenager with tears leaking from his eyes. "Please," he begs. "You don't understand—you don't know what it's like!" His voice rises shrilly, and Desmond shushes him, eyes darting to Elena. The boy shudders but drops his voice. "I don't want to serve her, I need to. You don't understand what it's like just to be near her, like something in me has been waiting for… for millennia to see her again. I'm scared. I don't know why this is so important, just that it is. I can't explain it, but… I need her. That's why I was put on this world, I know it was. I…"  
  
He shakes, and Desmond—to his own surprise—backs off. When he cries, the boy doesn't seem dangerous. If anything, he reminds Desmond unavoidably of Elena. They make exactly the same expression when they're trying not to cry, a twisted up face that looks like constipation.  
  
Desmond sits back, keeping himself between the boy and Elena. "What's your name?" he asks.  
  
"S—Sage."  
  
The word stirs something in Desmond's memory. Edward has talked about sages before, although Desmond can't remember the details. "You're a sage?" he asks, just to be sure.  
  
"No. Well—" he rubs his face, although this spreads the tears around more than wiping them away. "Yes, actually. I am a sage, but I'm also named Sage."  
  
"You're a sage called Sage?" Desmond asks, mouth twitching up in an involuntary smile.  
  
"Don't you start," Sage says. He sounds miserable. "All the others make fun of me already. It's not my fault my mother's family names everyone after herbs."  
  
"When you say 'all the others,' what does that mean?" Desmond asks. "What others?"  
  
"The other sages," Sage says. "There's… I don't know. Hundreds of us. We're all connected, and—"  
  
"Hang on," Desmond interrupts. "There's hundreds of other people like you that might come after us?"  
  
"No," Sage says. "It's just me and Standish in this time. Everyone else lives in the past or the future. But we're connected. We can travel through space and time to see one another."  
  
"Oh," Desmond says. "So—you're visitors."  
  
"What?" He sighs. "Alright, listen. Do you know what sages are?"  
  
"How would I know that?"  
  
"I thought…" he doesn't quite look Desmond in the eye. "She knows. She's still in your head."  
  
"She's not."  
  
"She is. So I thought since she knows, you might… never mind, I'll start at the beginning. Do you know who Aita was?"  
  
Desmond shakes his head.  
  
"She was Juno's husband," Sage says. "He died, and she didn't want to let go. So she took his DNA, and added it to a strain of human DNA. It'll pass through generations of humans and be completely dormant, and then when it reaches someone with a high enough percentage of Isu DNA, Aita's genes activate. We're born with his face, and his eyes. His…" Sage grows visibly more uncomfortable. "His memories. We're born connected to each other. We're born sages."  
  
"So you look like him," Desmond says. "And you have his memories. That doesn't mean—just because you have pieces of him in you, it doesn't mean you have to be him." After all, his face is virtually identical to Altair's, and he'd lived through far too many of his ancestor's memories. He hadn't become Altair—even when he was bleeding, he'd never completely given in.  
  
"It's not exactly like that," Sage says carefully. "We can't help it. There's… it's more than just being like Aita. Whatever Juno added to our DNA, she added—I don't know. We need her. I can't describe what it's like just to be near her, but it's… it's like living your whole life underground, and then coming up to the surface and seeing the sun for the first time. When she was there…" his voice drops again, back to the reverent whisper he'd used before. "I couldn't see anything but her. I wanted her to be happy. I would have done anything she asked, and I know I wasn't the only one." He stares at his shoes. "Standish had it worse. He's in love with her."  
  
"But you weren't?" Desmond asks.  
  
"I don't really fall in love?" Sage says. It sounds like he's asking a question, or asking for permission. "I'm… asexual. Aromantic."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I don't feel sexual or romantic attraction for anyone. Not even Juno, like I'm supposed to. So when she was in control of your body, I couldn't even love her then. I was supposed to, it's literally coded into my DNA, but I couldn't make myself… I couldn't love her. I need her, I'm obsessed with her, but—there's a difference. All I want to do is serve her. Standish wants to—"  
  
His stumbling, embarrassed explanation cuts off, as he seems to abruptly notice the expression on Desmond's face. He's trying not to show it too plainly, but he's not sure he wants to know what this other sage had wanted to do with his body. But… well, he's going to wonder now, isn't he? "Go ahead," he says.  
  
"He used to come find me in the temple after Juno was asleep," Sage mutters. "He never liked me, because… I guess he thinks my name is stupid. And I'm not very good at being a sage. We're supposed to love her and I couldn't. So he would come find me, and he would gloat about how much more Juno liked him than me. He talked about all the things they would do when she finally let him lie with her."  
  
"So just to clarify, that definitely never happened?" Desmond asks anxiously.  
  
"Just kissing," Sage says. He makes a face that strongly implies this had been absolutely disgusting. Desmond happens to agree. He also suddenly feels the need to brush his teeth for about an hour. "A lot of kissing. And they both got a little handsy. But that's it. Standish definitely would have bragged about it to me if they went any farther."  
  
Thank God. He casts around for a change of subject.  
  
"So what does this have to do with being connected?" he asks. "You said all the sages were connected, right?"  
  
"Mm, yea. That was something the first civilization developed. It's sort of like… cell phones, except you could only call a few people. Most people would choose to connect to five, maybe six others, and that would be their group. And instead of calling people and just hearing their voices, you'd show up wherever they were, and only the other people you were connected to would be able to see you. So…" he frowns. "Not… actually all that much like cell phones at all, I guess."  
  
But almost exactly like visiting, Desmond thinks. Is that where it had come from? He knows that eagle vision shows up in people with high percentages of precursor DNA. And all the visitors—A-Team, B-Team, even the new visitors—have eagle vision. So maybe that's why they'd become visitors? Visiting sounds a little different than the connections Sage is talking about. Desmond hadn't chosen to be a visitor, none of them had. And they can't choose when they visit. Aveline can sort of choose when to end one, but that's still slightly different. Maybe they're too human for that much control.  
  
He sort of likes that. Their visits can be inconvenient, annoying, confusing, embarrassing—but how many times have his visitors shown up exactly when he needed them, even though he hadn't known it himself?  
  
"All us sages are connected to each other," Sage says softly. "All of us. It's awful. I don't think I've even met all of them, and they just keep showing up. That's how I learned most of this—I do have… dreams and visions of Aita's life, but they only started a couple years ago. I learned a lot more from older sages that have known about this for longer." He half laughs. "I still don't know as much as most other sages. I'm sort of unpopular. Because—well, I'm supposed to be in love with her. And I'm not. I'm kind of a failure."  
  
"Personally," Desmond says, "I am really, really glad you aren't having weird sex fantasies about me."  
  
Sage goes bright red.  
  
Desmond goes on. He's not… entirely sure when this conversation transitioned into being almost friendly, and he definitely doesn't know why he's comforting Sage. He just looks so sad. "If I had to meet a sage," he says, "I would rather it be you than any of the others."  
  
"Does that mean I can stay with you?" Sage asks hopefully. "I just need to be around you. When she takes your body back, I need to be there for her. I can't help it. I need her."  
  
"She's not going to take my body back," Desmond insists. But then he hesitates. He's… sort of starting to feel bad for this kid. He knows what it's like to feel out of control of his own emotions, to be attached to people he doesn't want to care about. Is there a way he can help Sage? Get him past this obsessive need to be around Juno, or at least the body she'd been using?  
  
"She might," Sage mutters.  
  
Desmond sighs. "She won't," he says. "Listen. Go home.”

The boy’s face falls, and his whole body seems to crumble like his spine has just been pulled out. “I need her,” he begs. “Please!”

He's so pathetic that Desmond gives a little. “Leave me your phone number,” he mutters. “I'll call you.”  
  
Sage's breath catches, and he smiles. It's an odd smile, sort of sad. "Thank you," he says. "Thank you."  
  
Behind them, Elena makes a squeaky noise of complaint as she wakes up. "Daddy?" she calls, voice trembling. "Are you still here?"  
  
He hurries over and hugs her, and Elena buries herself in his chest. "I'm still hungry, daddy," she says.  
  
Desmond rubs at her back and glances back at Sage. "You said you have food, right?"  
  
Sage nods and starts pulling food out of his backpack. Elena's face lights up for a moment, but then she pauses. "He was in the temple," she whispers to Desmond. "I saw him!"  
  
"It's okay," Desmond says, hoping that it is. "He's not going to hurt us." He hands her a granola bar.  
  
"You're sure?"  
  
"I couldn't hurt your dad," Sage says. Elena eyes him suspiciously, even as she crams as much of the granola bar as she can fit into her mouth.  
  
"Chew," Desmond reminds her.  
  
"And I won't hurt you," Sage adds. "I don't like hurting people, and I'm not very good at it."  
  
She mumbles something around her food. Desmond and Sage both wait patiently as she chews and swallows and tries again. "The guy that looks like you hurt me," she says. "He pulled my hair."  
  
Sage looks at her, considering. "We're not the same person," he says at last. "Even if we look the same."  
  
Elena nods like this is enough, and goes back to eating. She doesn't hear—although Desmond does—when Sage turns away and mutters, "I don't think we are, anyway."

Desmond winces, but pretends not to have heard. He asks for Sage’s phone instead, and calls home. When Haytham picks up and answers with a gruff hello, Desmond almost breaks down crying in relief.

“Dad?” he says.

“Desmond?”

“I…” he looks around at Elena. “We need a ride home.”


	11. Chapter 11

It takes a long time to persuade Sage to head home, but eventually he goes, having made sure to leave his phone number on three different pieces of paper and the back of Desmond’s hand. Desmond is definitely going to have to watch for any cars following them back to the safehouse. Sage doesn’t look old enough to drive, but he’s probably not really old enough to run away and join a cult, either.

Haytham shows up not long after. Connor is in tow, which isn’t a surprise. Connor was the first of Desmond’s visitors to learn to drive; independence has always been important to him, and he wanted to be able to get around on his own. He’s still the best driver among them. In many ways, he’s the one who’s adjusted most comfortably to modern-day life.

What this means is that a lot of the others use him like a personal cab service. He probably learned in the Revolution that independence always has a price.

Haytham gives Desmond a slightly briefer hug than Desmond feels the situation warrants, then holds him at arm’s length and looks him up and down critically. “What on Earth are you wearing?”

“There wasn’t a lot of choice,” Desmond says. “You missed me, then?”

“He’s been extremely worried,” Connor says. “We all have.”

“Thank you, Connor,” Haytham says.

Desmond raises his eyebrows. “Well, now that your cover is blown and I know you care, can I get a proper hug?”

He _can_ get a proper hug, it turns out, and that more than anything else has him feeling that this whole ordeal is really over.

Eventually, Haytham lets go and stoops to hug Elena as well. “You didn’t tell us you were leaving. We’ve been searching for you.”

“You wouldn’t let me go,” Elena says, a little reproachfully.

“We were only trying to keep you safe,” Haytham says. He looks at Desmond. “At the cost of your freedom, perhaps. We tried to reach you, but I take it she was the one who could break Juno’s hold.”

“She was,” Desmond says. “She was amazing.”

“I apologise for not bringing her to you sooner,” Haytham says. “I hope you understand.”

Desmond nods. He’s not _sorry_ to be free of Juno, obviously, but he’d have told his visitors in a heartbeat to keep Elena away from her at all costs. It chills him to think of what might have happened to Elena if he hadn’t broken free when he did. “You did the right thing.”

-

Desmond’s barely through the door of the new safehouse when he’s knocked flat by Ezio _launching_ himself at him. He hasn’t recovered from the world’s most violent hug when Edward throws himself on both of them.

“Edward?” Desmond asks, trying to extricate himself. He’s vaguely aware of Connor ascending the stairs nearby, evidently concerned that he might somehow be drawn into the hugging if he lingers. “I thought you were at sea.”

“You needed my help,” Edward says, beaming. “Well, apparently you _didn’t_ need my help, but you _might_ have needed my help. So I came back. For now.”

“You never said goodbye,” Desmond says.

“Look, you’re not allowed to be angry with me,” Edward says. “ _I_ never put any evil glowing people in your head, did I?”

_Jacob_. It’s a problem Desmond’s been trying not to think about. But they’re going to have to address it sooner or later. He’ll visit.

“Do you know it was Jacob who did that?” he asks. “Do you think he’s actually in league with Juno?” He’s pissed off with Jacob – _seriously_ pissed off – but he really wants to believe that the whole Shroud thing was just some kind of horrible misunderstanding, rather than that Jacob is someone they’re actually going to have to _kill_. He doesn’t want to think about what that would do to Evie.

She’d probably kill Desmond for it. He doesn’t think their history together would stop her.

“I don’t think Jacob is guilty of anything more malicious than stupidity,” Haytham says. “He certainly seemed to regret his actions. But regret is only worth so much.”

Ezio frowns. “You think him beyond forgiveness?”

“Not necessarily. I shall see how I feel when this has been thoroughly put behind us.” Haytham gestures up the stairs. “The others will want to see you, Desmond.”

Desmond follows Ezio into a good-sized lounge. The couches look more comfortable than the ones in the last place they stayed (or the last place he _remembers_ staying, at least), but almost nobody is sitting; they’re all standing nervously or pacing the floor. The second she sees Desmond, Rebecca comes running across the room to hug him, swiftly followed by Aveline. Shaun pats him awkwardly on the shoulder. Altaïr only gives Desmond a nod, but somehow that’s the thing that really makes Desmond feel he’s come home.

“Oh, thank God,” Shay breathes, sitting down abruptly, when Haytham brings Elena into the room. “Elena.”

“He said over the phone that Elena was with him,” Haytham says. “Did I not mention?”

Shay shakes his head. “It’s all I’ve been able to think about. He comes home at last, and we have to tell him she’s missing.”

“I wouldn’t have come home at all without her,” Desmond says, squeezing Elena’s shoulder. “She’s incredible. So _none_ of you guys knew she was coming to find me?”

“Do you imagine any of us would have let her walk into the viper’s nest unaccompanied?” Haytham asks. “Or at all? Elena, who told you where to go?”

“My friends,” Elena says. “They’ve been telling me for _ages_. But I didn’t know where the place was.” She looks at Desmond. “That’s why I was late. I’m sorry.”

Desmond hugs her. “Your visitors told you, you mean? How did they know?”

“Perhaps she will tell her visitors after this that she found you in the Grand Temple,” Aveline says. “And in turn they will be able to pass it back to her.”

Desmond frowns. “Does that... work? Is it possible? She found me in the Grand Temple, so she was able to tell herself to go to the Grand Temple? It seems like kind of a paradox.”

“Well, maybe someone else told them.”

Desmond tenses at the new voice and looks around. It’s Jacob, it’s the person who threw him into this in the first place, looking nervous and hopeful.

Nervous and hopeful and... slightly proud of himself.

“So it worked?” Jacob asks. “She saved you?”

For a moment, Desmond finds himself so angry he can’t speak.

“You got me possessed by Juno,” he says, when he’s found his voice, “and then you _put my daughter in danger_?”

“Look,” Jacob says. He’s actually _smiling_. It’s infuriating. He seems to be making a token effort to look serious, at least, but the smile keeps breaking through. “I know you’re angry, and I completely understand why, but I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that you’re okay, and Arno’s okay, and Elena’s okay. So, really, everything’s fine.”

“Everything is not ‘fine’,” Desmond snaps. “I’ll probably be visiting you for the rest of my life. You could get yourself killed tomorrow and I’ll _still_ have to put up with you when I’m eighty.”

Jacob’s smile falters at that. He takes a step back. “I was trying to make things right.”

“Who’s Daddy mad at?” Elena asks Haytham, in a loud whisper.

“Jacob,” Haytham says. “Understandably.”

“But Jacob didn’t do anything wrong!” Elena objects. “And she isn’t here!”

“Jacob Frye,” Haytham says. “Evie’s brother. It seems he’s the one who had your visitors pass on that message.”

Elena’s eyes widen. “But that’s a _good_ thing! It helped me find Daddy!”

Jacob gestures pointedly at Elena. Desmond glares at him.

“Thank you, Mr Jacob!” Elena calls in Jacob’s approximate direction.

Desmond grabs Jacob’s arm and hauls him out of the room. He can’t have this conversation in front of Elena.

Jacob’s visiting one of the others in the lounge, it turns out, so they can’t get far. Desmond takes him into the bedroom next door. He doesn’t know who it belongs to, but from the neatness of the bed he can say with confidence that Edward’s never been anywhere near it.

“Right,” Desmond says, pushing Jacob away from him. “First of all, that shit about saving Arno—”

“That was true,” Jacob says, instantly. “It worked. She brought him back.”

“And I’m supposed to just believe that?” Desmond asks. “Because, I’ll be honest, you haven’t made yourself look very trustworthy.”

“You can ask the others,” Jacob says. “He was twenty-eight. Nobody had visited him past that, and now they’re seeing him older.”

Desmond tries to think. It’s true; he can’t remember ever seeing an Arno noticeably past his twenties.

Okay. If Jacob didn’t actually give him to Juno because he _wanted_ Juno in power, that’s something. But still. “And all you had to do was hand my body over to someone who wants to enslave humanity.”

“I didn’t know she wanted your body! I don’t make a habit of giving my friends to evil forces, you know. I thought her assistant would take the Shroud and leave.”

Desmond frowns. “You really didn’t know what would happen?”

“On my life,” Jacob says. “I _never_ know what I’m actually doing. You can ask Evie.”

So he was acting for Arno’s sake. And he didn’t deliberately put anyone else in Desmond’s head. Fine. Desmond still isn’t ready to forgive him.

“Maybe you didn’t know exactly what she’d do,” Desmond says. “But you knew how powerful the Shroud was, and you knew you were bringing it to someone dangerous when you had no idea what her plans for it were.”

“It was _Arno_ ,” Jacob says. “And I’d killed him. You can’t say you wouldn’t have done whatever it took to save my sister.”

Desmond flushes. “Evie? You can’t – that’s not the same thing—”

“It’s the same!” Jacob says, his voice breaking.

Desmond stares at him. After a moment, he wets his lips and tries to speak. “You and Arno...?”

Jacob shakes his head, with a strained smile. “Just me.”

God. He’d never even guessed. And yet somehow, now that his mind is bringing up all of Jacob’s non-stop chatter about their escapades, the way Jacob’s focus always seems to shift to Arno the second he shows up, he wonders how he could have missed it.

“So if Evie d...” Jacob falters on the word, but he presses on. “If Evie died? And it was your fault? And there was some way you could fix it, even if it seemed like a terrible idea?”

Desmond is still dwelling on Jacob’s confession about Arno, the moment he saw his own pain on Jacob’s face. Maybe they really are the same. Evie chose someone else, but Desmond still loves her, still wants her to be safe and happy. And if she died... if she died _because of Desmond_ , and he thought there was something he could do to help...

Well. Yeah. He can see himself making a bad decision.

“I don’t know if I’d have to go through with the stupid rescue plan,” he says at last, looking up at Jacob. “I kind of have a feeling you’d have beaten me to it.”

Jacob shakes his head. “God, I would have, wouldn’t I? Don’t tell her.”

Somehow Desmond manages to laugh, just a little, and some of the tension goes out of his shoulders.

“I’m still really pissed off with you,” he says after a moment, just to be clear.

“You can be as pissed off as you like,” Jacob says, with a shrug. “I’m just glad you’re _you_ again.”

There’s a pause.

Jacob lifts a cord from his neck. “Er, so do you want this back?”

It takes Desmond a moment to recognise what’s on the cord: Jacob’s shard of the Eye. The thing that _should_ , if Altaïr is right, bring Jacob to the future after he dies.

Desmond takes a deep breath and lets it out again.

“Keep it,” he says. “You’re still one of us.”

Jacob grins.


	12. Chapter 12

Desmond is visiting Jacob, but so is Arno. When Desmond arrives, the two of them are lying flat on their backs on a rooftop, sun shining down on them. Jacob is lying flat on his back, anyway—Arno looks like he'd started out on his back, but at the moment he's curled up in uncontrollable laughter.

"But did you see—" Jacob is laughing too, but mostly he seems focused on Arno's reaction more than himself. "The look on her face when she saw the—"

"The  _ banana _ !" Arno finishes, and then returns to his breathless giggling.

Jacob beams at him like he can't believe how perfect this moment is, and Desmond wonders how he'd never noticed before that Jacob is in love with Arno. He wonders how  _ Arno _ had never noticed that Jacob is in love with him.

Of course, Jacob apparently  _ had  _ noticed that he is in love with Arno, so clearly it's opposite day.

"I can't believe you  _ ate  _ that banana," Arno laughs.

"You know, it wasn't too bad."

This sends Arno into a fresh wave of laughter. Desmond decides that he doesn't really need to know what exactly they'd been doing with the banana, or why it had been so apparently inedible. He steps forward, and both of them look up at him. The smile fades off Jacob's face, but Arno just barely gets his giggling under control. His face is still pink from laughter, and his smile looks like it's going to split his face in two. "Hey," Desmond says.

"Do you want a banana?" Arno asks, and then falls about laughing again.

Desmond looks to Jacob for some kind of reasonable explanation, which is a new and interesting experience. "Is he drunk?" he asks, pointing at Arno.

"Well—tipsy, maybe. We  _ were  _ drinking, and apparently Arno can't hold his alcohol well."

"Nope," Arno says cheerfully. He sticks out his tongue.

"But…" Jacob grins. "We also may have been doing something fun and stupid, so there's that."

" _ Bananas! _ "

"Do I want to know…?"

"Almost definitely not."

"Hmm."

Desmond sits down next to Jacob, not too close, and considers him carefully. It's been months since then, but this is the first time he's visited Jacob since Desmond got his body back from Juno, and Jacob had confessed his feelings for Arno. Judging by the way his smile suddenly looks fixed and artificial, this is Jacob's first time seeing Desmond as well.

"So." Desmond jerks his head toward Arno. "The last time you two did something stupid, I ended up with an evil undead woman controlling my body. And you're going right back to putting Arno's life in danger again?"

"No," Arno says, sitting up. He wobbles, almost falls from the roof, and Jacob's hand shoots out like lightning to catch his arm and steady him. Arno ignores him, shaking his finger at Desmond. "No, no, no, no, no. No. See, we talked about this."

"Did you?"

"We're all in danger all the time!" Arno says. "We're assassins! I might get stabbed tomorrow, or fall off a building tonight. My life is always in danger anyway, so why not put it in danger in  _ fun  _ ways, sometimes? I like doing stupid things with Jacob. I don't want to stop."

Desmond looks at Arno and his smile, and then he looks at Jacob and his nervous frown. He looks like he expects Desmond is going to tell them to stop—but it's not like Desmond owns Arno. He'd paid for Arno's resurrection, but it's still Arno's life to do with as he wishes. "Just be careful," he says.

"I'm not going to let him die in a stupid way again," Jacob says, quietly. "Don't worry, I'm looking out for him."

Desmond nods, and pulls something out of his pocket. "This might help," he says. Jacob's face lights up at the sight of one of the shards.

"Arno!" he calls, grabbing it from Desmond. "Look, Desmond has a very important thing for you to hang onto! Oh, wait—" he stuffs it back into Desmond's hand. "I forgot,  _ you  _ have to give it to him."

And Desmond does, but Jacob is the one that explains how it's supposed to work to Arno, and he's the one that carefully watches as Arno tucks it away somewhere it's unlikely to get lost.

Desmond nods and Jacob grins back at him. "We're okay," he says. "Aren't we?"

"Yea," Desmond says. "We're okay." Then he smiles hopefully. "Do you think you could track down Evie? I haven't seen her since before… you know. Everything."

"Depends," Jacob says. "Do you have a shard for her, too?"

"I didn't think I'd see both of them together," Desmond admits. "I only brought one—I'll give her one the next time I see her."

"But—"

"Jacob," Desmond says. "It's  _ Evie _ . Of course I'll give her one."

"Come on, then," Jacob says. He helps Arno to his feet ("let's not do a leap of faith to get down," Arno mumbles. "I think I might throw up"), and the three of them slowly descend to street level.

Arno vanishes halfway down the first street, and Jacob glances sideways at Desmond. "She was really worried about you," he says quietly. "And really angry with me." For a second, they teeter on the edge of some kind of awkwardness. Desmond could point out that Evie has every right to be upset with her brother, for example, and a part of him wants to.

But no. He's so tired of all this, tired of his visitors walking on eggshells around him, tired of Elena looking at him like she doesn't quite trust him to stay, tired of trying to figure out who the fuck is to blame for this. He needs it to stop being a thing, and just let everything go back to normal.

"So business as usual?" Desmond asks instead.

Jacob cracks a smile. "Well, sort of," he admits. "But this is  _ different _ ."

"How's Henry?" Desmond asks, before he can stop himself.

"He's… really confused, I guess," Jacob says. "Obviously me and Evie can't tell him why we're angry with each other, but he's not stupid. He works with both of us, he caught on pretty quick that  _ something's  _ going on. I think him being around is one of the things that's really helped Evie, lately."

Desmond nods, and doesn't complain when Jacob leaves it there. He doesn't particularly want to talk about Henry.

They get to the familiar train, and because it's not at a station, they go through the exhausting process of chasing it down and jumping on while it's still in motion. Desmond trails after Jacob as he makes his way to Evie's compartment and bangs on the door. "Evie!" he shouts.

" _ Jacob _ ," she calls back, in a tone of clear warning. "Go away."

"Evie?" Desmond asks.

There's silence for a second, then the door opens and Evie bursts through it to hug him. She'd never been this aggressively affectionate even when they were together, which tells Desmond exactly how worried about him she must have been. "I'm okay," he says. "I'm fine, Juno's dead."

"And she didn't hurt you?"

"She shaved my legs," Desmond says, and Evie laughs. It's a strangled, wet noise like she's trying not to cry. "Which is pretty weird, I'm not going to lie. But I'm fine, Evie. I'm fine."

"You're fine?"

He holds her tighter for a minute, then lets go and steps back a step or two. He and Jacob both pretend to be looking somewhere else while Evie wipes a few tears off her face and composes herself.

"We should talk," she says. "I've really missed you."

"I missed you," Desmond agrees. "And…" he hesitates, because even when he'd been with Evie, he hadn't tried to interfere with her relationship with Jacob. That's something he's just never going to understand. Still, this needs to be said. "I think Jacob missed you too."

Jacob is obviously trying to keep the nervously hopeful look off his face, but it's not really working.

"Alright," Evie says. She smiles a little. " _ Both _ of you should come in and talk."

They follow her into the compartment, and arrange themselves as best they can in the limited space. In the end, Desmond doesn't end up saying much. He's really happy just to be around Evie again, and he'll have plenty of time to talk to her later. It's Jacob and Evie that seem to  _ explode  _ into conversation, talking over each other and interrupting, words spilling uncontrollably from both of them at once, catching up on everything they haven't been able to say when they weren't speaking.

Desmond isn't entirely sure they notice when his visit ends, but he can't bring himself to be upset about that. Besides, Elena is giving him that don't-leave-me-again-daddy look when he gets back to his own time. She's sitting about three inches from him on the couch, pretending to watch TV but really watching him.

He knows he can't fix everything with hugs, but when he leans over and holds her close, when he feels her relax and wrap her arms around his chest, Desmond thinks maybe he can fix just what's wrong right this second. And he  _ won't  _ leave her again, he's going to be here as long as she needs him. He'll be here in an hour to fix what's wrong then, and he'll be here tomorrow to fix that day's problems. They'll take it one day at a time, and someday she'll be happy again. And then everything will be okay.

"I love you," Desmond says.

"Love you too," Elena tells him.


End file.
